Lynn, Massachusetts, once the leading shoe manufacturing city of the United States, was in many ways a model of the industrial city that much of America was to become. This study of the early industrial revolution in Lynn focuses on the journeymen shoemakers--leading participants in the making of the institutions, ideas, and events that form central themes in the history of working people in America.

Spanning the time period from just after the American Revolution to the Civil War, it places special emphasis on the social changes that accompany industrialization, and the impact of those...