88) that became the national yardstick for measuring success, first among white men during the antebellum period, and then casting a wider net in the post-Civil War era; and the other a "culture of surveillance" that some resented as an invasion of privacy but others welcomed as a way to redeem their financial and spiritual selves in an increasingly bureaucratized, market-oriented society.

A number of historians, including Cunliffe, Mandel, and Roediger, have investigated the links between labor and abolitionism in the antebellum period.

Black women's labor during the antebellum period is the focus of Xiomara Santamarina's Belabored Professions: Narratives of African American Working Womanhood (The University of North Carolina Press, 2005).