Credit: Courtesy of the Collections of the University of Pennsylvania Archives
A Philadelphia blue blood who taught sociology at the University of Pennsylvania from 1947 to 1986, E. Digby Baltzell was one of the nation’s most eloquent interpreters of American white Anglo-Saxon Protestants—or "WASPs" as he delighted in calling them. Philadelphia Gentlemen: The Making of a National Upper Class (1958) and Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia: Two Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Class Authority and Leadership (1979) remain two of his most celebrated studies of Philadelphia's Anglo-American elite.
