Occupied Bodies, Recognition, and Riot is a study of the transition from traditional popular culture to the first forms of industrial popular culture among the white working population of Philadelphia. Building from a focus on ambivalent masculinity, the book argues that traditional culture was animated by apprehensions concerning male bodies and that escalating anxieties and pain associated with the representation of male bodies drove the dramatic transformation of white male popular culture in Philadelphia after 1825.
Ric Caric looks at transformations in white working-class culture in Philadelphia in the decades preceding the Civil War. Considering a wide range of cultural texts, including songs, diarie,, fire company records, medical testimonies, radical labor agitation, temperance activism, race riots, and blackface, the author suggests that this was a period of wide-ranging transformation, particularly in regard to male identity and the institutions through which new forms of masculinity were experienced.