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 the anxieties and pain associated with the representation of male bodies drove the dramatic transformation of Philadelphia popular culture 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 songs, diaries, newspaper accounts of workplace leisure, fire company records, medical testimonies, radical political agitation, temperance activism, race riots, and minstrel performances, the author suggests that this time was a period of transformation, particularly in regard to displays and expressions of masculinity.