On the Make: Clerks and the Quest for Capital in Nineteenth-Century America

"This fascinating portrait of American striving . . . locates the origins of white-collar culture in the precarious world of the antebellum clerk" (Timothy B. Spears, author of Chicago Dreaming).

In the mid-nineteenth-century, ambitious young men found a path to wealth and respect by working as clerks in the bustling cities of the American Northeast. At stores and commercial offices, these strivers and "counter jumpers" also found opportunities for self-gratification in their new identitie...