Philadelphia Gentlemen : The Making of a National Upper Class

This is a classic study of Philadelphia’s business aristocracy of colonial stock with Protestant affiliations.

It is also an analysis of how fabulously wealthy nineteenth-century family founders produced a national upper-class way of life.

But as that way of life came to an end, the upper-class outlived its function; this, argues E.

Digby Baltzell, is precisely what took place in the Philadelphia class system.

For sociologists, historians, and those concerned with issues of culture and the economy, this is indeed a classic of modern social science.