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Sociologist E. Digby Baltzell, circa 1960.
flipFlip to Essayist Agnes Repplier, 1910.
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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. 

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