An investigation of how Americans - intellectuals, labour reformers, politicians, journalists, capitalists, and manual workers - viewed the intrinsic character of manual labour in the decades before the Civil War. Glickstein focuses on both the intellectual origins of attitudes that distinguished manual from mental activity and on the ways these attitudes were influenced by the mounting sectional conflict over black slave labour and by the tide of industrialization that was sweeping the Western world. He finds that the meanings ascribed to manual work were a complex amalgam of major intellectual traditions, notably those deriving from the Old Testament, classical Greek philosophy, evangelical religion, and classical economics. These meanings not only drew on percpetions of southern slaves, but also on perceptions of various forms of European and immigrant labour as animalistic drudgery; and they were reflected in the enourmous Anglo-American Victorian literature on poverty, mass education, family structure, and working-class unrest. Glickstein explores how industrial capitalism reinforced the perceived centuries-old division between manual and mental labour, and he examines some of the principal arguments used to justify or rationalize why the most disagreeable work was performed by stigmatized or powerless groups; enslaved and free blacks, immigrants and women.