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This essay draws on an uninterrupted stretch of indictment records from 1827 to 1846 to consider the relationship between hard times and property crimes in rural Pennsylvania. Focusing on working poor defendants, the piece illustrates how struggling men and women used petty crime as a makeshift response to material hardship and how such a strategy often led to more hard times. By examining the ways in which economic conditions and crime together shaped the lives of laboring people in a rural setting, this essay adds to the rich historiographies of working- class experience and crime in Pennsylvania. Demonstrating that rural crime was born of the same struggle for survival as it was in the Jacksonian city, the essay ultimately suggests that, amid capitalist transformation, the material lives of Urban and rural working people--if they were ever that different--grew increasingly uniform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented regarding the development of the abolition of slavery in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania between 1780 and 1838. Particular focus is given to the social conflict between whites and blacks during the emancipation of slaves, as well as questions related to the voting and citizenship rights of freed slaves.

The article discusses the contribution of frontier settlers of Pennsylvania to the Enlightenment. The author discusses how the views of authors Benjamin Rush and Patrius characterizing frontier settlers as barbarians compare to the life and writings of settler James Smith. He suggests settlers participated in the Enlightenment through their resistance to capitalism. Smith's writings attacking the Shakers are noted and a comparison of Smith and philosopher Adam Ferguson is presented.

The article aims to broaden and deepen the traditional narrative of the Philadelphia Election Riot in Pennsylvania to include the social and economic concerns of those people traditionally written out of the story. It also examines the material world of Philadelphia's elite and accumulation to demonstrate the increasing power and wealth of the city's merchant elite in contrast to workers and farmers. It then discusses the source of elite division before deepening the investigation to find the roots of politicization among servants, Germans and sailors.