Middle class

Budapest between the two World Wars was a vibrant, cultnred city with excellent theaters, concert halls, opera house, and museums. The city consisted of ten districts. The working-class industrial outskirts of Pest had their row-houses, whereas the middle-class inner city had quite imposing apartment buildings. The upper classes and aristocracy lived in their villas in the hills of Buda. 

Mittel-stadt, /. medium-sized city, -stand, m. middle class. 

Wright, L.B. Middle-class culture in Elizabethan England. Ithaca (NY) Cornell UnivP, 1958. 

Although the new Duke of Orleans was the wealthiest man in Europe, he was wildly popular with the French public. The house of Orleans had been the liberal voice of France for 150 years. Cousins of the French kings, the dukes opposed the monarchy s absolute power and the Catholic Church s monopoly on education and supported the aspirations of the growing middle class. Radicals talked of making the new duke regent or even king. 

In the United States—where the inhabitants were considered filthy, bordering on the beastly —basins, pitchers, and washstands did not become middle-class essentials until after 1850. During the American Civil War, the North adopted Florence Nightingale s nursing reforms to popularize hygiene and keep its soldiers disease-free. 

William Henry Perkin, an 18-year-old working in the back room and outdoor shed of his London home, had discovered in black coal tar a beautiful purple dye that would change the world. For the first time in history, color could be democratized. William Henry Perkin and his purple, later known as mauve, rescued the poor and middle classes from their age-old austerity of hues. Natural dyes were expensive and, before Perkin s synthetic mauve, millions of poor people lived their lives in untreated drab and dingy fibers. Even for the middle class, pieces of brilliantly dyed cloth were treasures to be reused from garment to garment and from year to year. It was the schoolboy William Henry Perkin and his successors who would give the world the ample abundance of tints that only the rich had previously enjoyed. 

The results regarding socioeconomic gradients undermines the hypothesis that the principal social class influence on health is material deprivation. In fact, the social class gradient in health cuts deeply into the affluent middle classes. The implication is that the conditions under which people live can affect human health directly, and not only through material deprivation. Early childhood experience, one s place in the social environment, and the experiences of daily life must be powerful determinants of the length and healthfulness of life (Kelly et al., 1997, p. 438). 

HIGGINS Independence That s middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth. 

Herman Francis Mark was born in Vienna on May 3, 1895. The oldest of three children and son of a family physician, he was raised in that city s Fourth District, then a semi-commercial area inhabited by lower middle class families. Mark s father was a German Jew who embraced Lutheranism on marriage. 

The discipline he mentions was taught by example by intelligent, benevolent adults. A young middle-class Viennese was taught to seek knowledge and maintain an open mind in judging facts. He was taught cooperation and how to listen, yet intellectual freedom was also fostered. Freedom to question and analyze, and rethink. A freedom which, Mark cautions, should not be confused with undisciplined, boundless movement. 

The people of Kingberry Court are themselves typical examples of upper-middle-class Americans. Six of the eight respondents interviewed hold advanced degrees and all eight households earn more than 100,000 per year. Their... 

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