On the Make: Clerks and the Quest for Capital i. Luskey<|

On the MakeClerks and the Quest for Capital in Nineteenth-Century America\nAuthor(s): Brian P. Luskey\nFormat: Paperback\nPublisher: New York University Press, United States\nImprint: New York University Press\nISBN-13: 9780814753101, 978-0814753101\nSynopsis\nIn 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 menwhile making sense of a volatile capitalist economy and fluid urban societywas fraught with uncertainty.\nIn 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, n.