The Lower Sort: Philadelphia`s Laboring People 1750-1880, Smith Billy G.

This book recreates the daily lives of laboring men and women in Americas 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.