Stability and Change in Revolutionary Pennsylvania examines the society and economy of Pennsylvania from about 1740 to 1790, the period that many historians have identified as formative in the making of modern America. Did the Quaker province become truly "modern" during this period? No, says George Rappaport, but he suggests that by 1790 modernization had begun.

Rappaport is almost unique among early American historians in his application of explicit social-scientific models to historical evidence. In the first part of the book he offers an analysis of Pennsylvania's social...