The Refinement of America
Persons, Houses, Cities
Published on 21. September 2011
528 pages
978-0-307-76160-6 (ISBN)
Description
This lively and authoritative volume makes clear that the quest for taste and manners in America has been essential to the serious pursuit of a democratic culture. Spanning the material world from mansions and silverware to etiquette books, city planning, and sentimental novels, Richard L. Bushman shows how a set of values originating in aristocratic court culture gradually permeated almost every stratum of American society and served to prevent the hardening of class consciousness. A work of immense and richly nuanced learning, The Refinement of America newly illuminates every facet of both our artifacts and our values.
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Book
08/1993
Vintage Books
€26.20
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Book
09/1992
Knopf Publishing Group
€57.06
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Person
Richard Lyman Bushman, Gouverneur Morris Professor of History, Emeritus, at Columbia University, grew up in Portland, Oregon, and earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees from Harvard University. He has also taught at Brigham Young University, Boston University, and the University of Delaware. His From Puritan to Yankee: Character and Social Order in Connecticut, 1690?1765 won the Bancroft Prize in 1967. His other books include Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism (1984), winner of the Evans Biography Award; King and People in Provincial Massachusetts (1985); and The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (1992). A practicing Mormon, he lives in New York City with his wife, Claudia.
Content
- Intro
- About the Author
- Other Books by This Author
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Gentility 1700-1790
- I. The Gentrification of Rural Delaware
- II. The Courtesy-Book World
- III. Bodies and Minds
- IV. Houses and Gardens
- V. Cities and Churches
- VI. Ambivalence
- Respectability 1790-1850
- VII. Vernacular Gentility in Rural Delaware
- VIII. The Comforts of Home
- IX. Literature and Life
- X. Religion and Taste
- XI. City and Country
- XII. Culture and Power
- Notes
- List of Illustrations and Credits
