Billy G. Smith

Death and Life in a Colonial Immigrant City: A Demographic Analysis of Philadelphia

This study analyzes the demographic characteristics of a previously neglected area in colonial America—the urban center. Growth, birth, and death rates in Philadelphia between 1720 and 1775 are estimated using a variety of sources. Immigration, smallpox, economic vacillations, and a skewed age structure are attributed primary responsibility in determining the level of and changes in Philadelphias vital rates. The elevated level of these rates is evident in a comparison with vital rates in Andover and Boston, Massachusetts, and Nottingham, England.

Inequality in Late Colonial Philadelphia: A Note on Its Nature and Growth

H T ISTORIANS have been interested in the study of economic inequality in British America because of the subjects political implications, particularly for the Revolutionary period, and also because the idea of equality is central to the democratic mythology of American society. During the past two decades, social and economic historians have measured the structure of wealth in selected areas of the colonies, reaching sometimes contradictory conclusions. The subtleties of individual arguments aside, two competing hypotheses have emerged to explain the overall trend in the distribution of wealth for the whole colonial period. The first avers that frontier influences created a rough material equality among the early settlers, but that, as the frontier receded, a smaller proportion of persons gained control of a larger proportion of the wealth. The Revolution only temporarily retarded this growing stratification. Proponents of this theory of progressive inequality rely heavily on evidence not only from older agrarian areas in the northern colonies but, especially, from the cities of Philadelphia, Boston, and New York.1

Rum Punch and Revolution: Tavern-Going and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century in Philadelphia

In Rum Punch and Revolution, Thompson shows how the public houses provided a setting in which Philadelphians from all walks of life revealed their characters and ideas as nowhere else. He takes the reader into the cramped confines of the colonial bar room, describing the friendships, misunderstandings, and conflicts which were generated among the citys drinkers, and investigates the profitability of running a tavern in a city which, until independence, set maximum prices on the cost of drinks and services in its public houses.Taverngoing, Thompson writes, fostered a sense of citizenship that influenced political debate in colonial Philadelphia and became an issue in the citys revolution. Opinionated and profoundly undeferential taverngoers did more than drink; they forced their political leaders to consider whether and how public opinion could be represented in the counsels of a newly independent nation.