The "Lower Sort": Philadelphia's Laboring People 1750-1880

by Smith, Billy Gordon

• ISBN13: 9780801481635
• ISBN10: 0801481635
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1994-01-01
• Publisher: Cornell Univ Pr

Summary

This book recreates the daily lives of laboring men and women in America's premier urban center during the second half of the eighteenth century. Billy G. Smith demonstrates how the "lower sort" (as they were called by their contemporaries) struggled to carve out meaningful lives during an era of vast change stretching from the Seven Years' War, through the turbulent events surrounding the American Revolution and the U.S. Constitution, into the first decade of the new nation.

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction	p. 1
Walking the Streets	p. 7
Deaths and Births in an Immigrant City	p. 40
Laboring People and the Urban Economy	p. 63
Material Conditions	p. 92
Careers	p. 126
Migration, Housing, and Poverty	p. 150
Family Lives	p. 176
Conclusion	p. 197
Limited Prosopography	p. 201
Demographic Conditions of Philadelphia	p. 204
Occupational Structure of Philadelphia	p. 213
Appendix D	p. 216
Appendix E	p. 224
Appendix F	p. 230
Index	p. 239
Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.