Philadelphia was the most dynamic city in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British America. In Making the Early Modern Metropolis, Daniel 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 to provide a detailed exploration of how everyday struggles shaped the city’s growth. 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. Until now, histories of early Philadelphia, and Pennsylvania at large, have emphasized its novel commitment to liberal and modern religious, economic, and political principles. Making the Early Modern Metropolis reveals that it was in the interplay of inherited and often competing systems of belief during a period of profound transformation throughout the Atlantic world that early modern cities like Philadelphia were shaped.

A record of literary properties sold at auction in the United States.

Among the radical sects which flourished during the tumultuous years of the English Revolution, the early Quakers were particularly aware of the power of the written word to promote their prophetic visions?and unorthodox beliefs. This collection of new essays by literary scholars and historians looks at the diversity of seventeenth-century Quaker writing, examining its rhetoric, its polemical strategies, its purposeful use of the print medium, and the heroism and vehemence of its world vision.