On the Make

Clerks and the Quest for Capital in Nineteenth-Century America

By: Brian P. Luskey

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Paperback | 31 December 2011

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Paperback
287 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
22.23 x 14.61 x 1.91

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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.

Industry Reviews

"Luskey now provides us with a thickly researched account of these men 'on the make' effectively redefining the national projects of independence, manliness, and industry. 'Who built America?' historians have long asked. Surprisingly, perhaps embarrassingly, as Luskey suggests, the clerk did." The Journal of American History "Luskey combines the methods of cultural and social history to accomplish a tricky feat: he maps out, on the one hand, the structural impediments to clerks' quest for 'economic capital,' and on the other hand, the hazardous discursive field in which they pursued 'cultural capital.' Making use of diaries, credit reports, manuscript census schedules, and a variety of print media, he skillfully documents the clerk's many travails." Common-place

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