John Carson, The Measure of Merit: Talents, Intelligence, and Inequality in the French and American Republics, 1750-1940 (Princeton: University of Princeton Press, 2006). Read the Introduction and Chapters 1-3.

Paul DiMaggio, “Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston: The Creation of an Organizational Base for High Culture in America,” in Media, Culture and Society 4 (1982): 33-50.

Sven Beckert, "Institution-Building and Class Formation: How the Nineteenth-Century Bourgeoisie Organized," in Sven Beckert and Julia B. Rosenbaum, The American Bourgeoisie: Distinction and Identity in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 103-119.