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Excerpt from A Century of Service, 1815-1915 It is easy to believe that the first Silas Peirce had his imagination and his desire to see the world stimulated by the travellers' tales that he heard about the fireplace in his father's inn. These trav ellers doubtless gave him an idea of what was going on in the great world outside the little village, so when he was fifteen years old he left home and came to Boston to seek his fortune. He began work in a ship carpenter's shop, where for a fortnight he wielded his tools most industriously, but one day he dropped an adze on his foot and the slight acci. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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This volume engages a fundamental disciplinary question about this period in American history: how did the bourgeoisie consolidate their power and fashion themselves not simply as economic leaders but as cultural innovators and arbiters? It also explains how culture helped Americans form both a sense of shared identity and a sense of difference.