On the Make : Clerks and the Quest for Capital in Nineteenth-Century America / Brian P. Luskey.

9780814753484

New York, NY : : New York University Press, [2010]

©2010

English

In English.

1 online resource

10.18574/nyu/9780814752289.001.0001 doi

HD8039.M4 U554 2016

305.55

In the bustling cities of the mid-nineteenth-century Northeast, young male clerks working in commercial offices and stores were on the make, persistently seeking wealth, respect, and self-gratification. Yet these strivers and "counter jumpers" discovered that claiming the identities of independent men-while making sense of a volatile capitalist economy and fluid urban society-was fraught with uncertainty. In On the Make, Brian P. Luskey illuminates at once the power of the ideology of self-making and the important contests over the meanings of respectability, manhood, and citizenship that helped to determine who clerks were and who they would become. Drawing from a rich array of archival materials, including clerks' diaries, newspapers, credit reports, census data, advice literature, and fiction, Luskey argues that a better understanding of clerks and clerking helps make sense of the culture of capitalism and the society it shaped in this pivotal era.

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American History and Culture ; ; 1

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