Working People of Philadelphia, 1800-1850

he was one of the first American authors to acknowledge that workers had an intellectual history.This new approach, pioneered by historians like Laurie, would go off into different threads of labor history, some recurring in importance, most recently with the rediscovered interest in religion and the working class.The opening of these new vistas by Laurie and his contemporary New Labor historians made it possible for later scholars to look at whole new aspects of working-class life.It gave me permission to delve into working-class youth culture and labor feminism in Jazz Age Philadelphia in what would otherwise have been a fairly standard institutional history of the hosiery workers' union.Notwithstanding this vital contribution, Working People of Philadelphia is an early example of the weaknesses as well as the strengths of the New Labor History.While the new paradigm recognized workers' agency in the shaping of their own lives, critics charged that it neglected institutions and elites.Some, including myself, are convinced that labor leaders and unions shape workers' goals and values as much as they also reflect them, that identities are always multiple and subject to change, and that power is always contested.Scholars in the twenty-first century have been working to bring the analysis of class back into a central place in history, including in the new field of the "new history of capitalism."Now, however, they do so with the inclusion of those other factors that make up the fuller reality of working people's lives.Thanks to the earlier contributions of books like Working People of Philadelphia, historians will never again be able to credibly present working people as pawns in an impersonal historical process in which they had no active part.Working People of Philadelphia is important as a classic example of the early days of the New Labor History, but it is also valuable in its own right.It has had two previous lives, as a dissertation in