On the make : clerks and the quest for capital in nineteenth-century America

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 citizenshi