Description: "In Making the Early Modern Metropolis, Daniel P. Johnson takes a thematic approach to Philadelphia's related economic, legal, and popular cultures to provide a comprehensive view of its urban development, taking readers into this colonial city's homes, workshops, taverns, courtrooms, and public spaces. Philadelphia's evolution, Johnson argues, can only be understood by situating it within an explicitly early modern and Atlantic framework to show that inherited beliefs, which originated in late medieval and Renaissance Europe, informed urban social and cultural developments"--
Review Quotes:
In Making the Early Modern Metropolis: Culture and Power in Pre-Revolutionary Philadelphia, Daniel P. Johnson argues that two visions of Philadelphia society emerged between 1720 and 1760: a communal understanding of social relations, originating in a seventeenth-century, if not sixteenth-century, idea and an increasingly centralized authority along with a disturbing rise of individualism. These types of debates reflected disagreements between an individualistic and communitarian economy, which, may have roots in England's enclosure controversies of the previous century.
--H-Pennsylvania