Making the Early Modern Metropolis
Description
Philadelphia was the most dynamic city in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British America. In Making the Early Modern Metropolis, Daniel Johnson takes a thematic approach to Philadelphia's related economic, legal, and popular cultures to provide a comprehensive view of its urban development, taking readers into this colonial city's homes, workshops, taverns, courtrooms, and public spaces to provide a detailed exploration of how everyday struggles shaped the city's growth.
Philadelphia's evolution, Johnson argues, can only be understood by situating it within an explicitly early modern and Atlantic framework to show that inherited beliefs, which originated in late medieval and Renaissance Europe, informed urban social and cultural developments. Until now, histories of early Philadelphia, and Pennsylvania at large, have emphasized its novel commitment to liberal and modern religious, economic, and political principles. Making the Early Modern Metropolis reveals that it was in the interplay of inherited and often competing systems of belief during a period of profound transformation throughout the Atlantic world that early modern cities like Philadelphia were shaped.
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Person
Daniel P. Johnson is Assistant Professor of American Culture and Literature at Bilkent University, Ankara.
Content
Introduction
1. "Nothing Will Satisfy You But Money": Community, Credit, and the Politics of Money
2. "A Great Number of Hands": Property, Empire, and Unfree Labor
3. "Unintelligibile Stuff Called Law": Cultural Legalism and Authority in the City
4. "A Growing Evil in the City": Law, Crime, and the Atlantic Diaspora
5. The Urban Battle of Ideas: Order, the People, and the Press
6. Polite Spaces and Nurseries of Vice: Place, Disorder, and Cultural Practice
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
