Bowing to Necessities: A History of Manners in America, 1620-1860
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Description
Anglo-Americans wrestled with some profound cultural contradictions as they shifted from the hierarchical and patriarchal society of the seventeenth-century frontier to the modern and fluid class democracy of the mid-nineteenth century. How could traditional inequality be maintained in the socially leveling environment of the early colonial wilderness? And how could nineteenth-century Americans pretend to be equal in an increasingly unequal society?
Bowing to Necessities argues that manners provided ritual solutions to these central cultural problems by allowing Americans to act out--and thus reinforce--power relations just as these relations underwent challenges. Analyzing the many sermons, child-rearing guides, advice books, and etiquette manuals that taught Americans how to behave, this book connects these instructions to individual practices and personal concerns found in contemporary diaries and letters. It also illuminates crucial connections between evolving class, age, and gender relations. A social and cultural history with a unique and fascinating perspective, Hemphill's wide-ranging study offers readers a panorama of America's social customs from colonial times to the Civil War. [from the publisher]
ISBN
978-0195125573
Publication Date
9-23-1999
Publisher
Oxford University Press
City
New York
Keywords
etiquette, United States, history, manners, hierarchy, social order, middle class, women, youth, inequality, power relations, behavior, class relations, gender relations, age relations
Disciplines
Arts and Humanities | History | Inequality and Stratification | Social and Behavioral Sciences | Social History | Sociology | United States History
