Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities

by Richard Lyman Bushman

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780679744146
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/28/1993
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	504
Sales rank:	136,701
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.97(h) x 1.11(d)

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments
	Introduction
	Gentility 1700 - 1790
I	The Gentrification of Rural Delaware	3
II	The Courtesy-Book World	30
III	Bodies and Minds	61
IV	Houses and Gardens	100
V	Cities and Churches	139
VI	Ambivalence	181
	Respectability 1790 - 1850
VII	Vernacular Gentility in Rural Delaware	207
VIII	The Comforts of Home	238
IX	Literature and Life	280
X	Religion and Taste	313
XI	City and Country	353
XII	Culture and Power	402
	Notes	449
	Index	485
	List of Illustrations and Credits	501

Editorial Reviews

"This important study . . . offers a promising framework for understanding American life."— The New York Times Book Review"From an astonishing array of sources Bushman has pieced together an extraordinarily rich and readable account of the spread of gentility over a century and a half. . . . This is a remarkable book about a subject that is presently emerging as one of the most significant in the history not only of early America but of all early modern Western societies."— Gordon S. Wood, author of The Radicalism of the American Revolution"The scope of this book is enormous. . . . Bushman is a skilled researcher, and he has combed the archives of historical museums for his evidence, which he arranges neatly and intelligently."—Los Angeles Times Book Review"One of the most skillful and sensitive accounts in a fresh field . . . The Refinement of America will fundamentally alter the way we think about the genesis of American civilization."— Michael Kammen, Cornell University

From the Publisher

If Bushman is correct, it was not until the mid-19th century that a majority of middle-class Americans displayed a concern for taste and beauty in their dress, comportment, manners and houses. From colonial times to the Revolution, he writes, gentility was the exclusive province of the gentry--wealthy merchants, planters, clergymen and professionals who copied a Renaissance-inspired ideal imitated by Europe's aristocracy. This intriguing social history shows how a diluted version of gentility became an underpinning of middle-class self-respect as millions of Americans moved into houses with book-lined parlors, consulted etiquette manuals and cultivated gardens. Bushman, a Columbia history professor, argues that the worldly, leisure-oriented genteel code clashed with egalitarian and religious values yet fueled the ethos of consumption that helped capitalism thrive. Photos. BOMC and History Book Club alternates. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

What were the effects of refinement on personalities, society, and the material world in early America? In this work, Bushman maps the spread of refinement in 18th- and 19th-century America. The first section, ``Gentility, 1700-1790,'' takes the ``parlor life'' movement from the urban wealthy, spreading across the land to encompass the small-town prosperous to affluent rural estates with a refined life limited to gentry. It exerted narrow influence on the lives of middle- and working-class Americans. The second section, ``Respectability, 1790-1850,'' maps refinement as it spread down through the social structure to include the middle class and influence the working class. During this time, gentility expanded, with more people acquiring possessions, parlors, and the mannerisms of the genteel style. Bushman does a good job of showing the historical origins of refinement, its expansion in the United States, and its reflections in current society. Important to any library interested in the cultural life of America.-- Terri P. Summey, Emporia State Univ. Lib., Kan.

Library Journal

A historical survey of the idea of gentility as expressed in architecture, furnishings, fashions, manners, and taste from about 1690-1850. Bushman (History/Columbia; co-editor, Uprooted Americans, 1979) has the rare gift of seeing the theoretical—the bases of class, power, and culture—in domestic, ordinary, specific detail and behavior. The author begins with the years 1700-90, tracing the origins of gentility to the aristocratic and worldly courts of Europe, and observing its sudden emergence in the refinements of colonial centers—rural and urban—in mansions, gardens, pianos, parasols, carpets, penmanship, courtesy books, personal hygiene, and social discipline. He then considers the years after the Revolution, from 1790-1850, during which gentility became "vernacular," democratized, identified with respectability—a middle-class standard associated with domesticity, religion, and the work ethic, with its major site being the ubiquitous parlor. Although gentility was exclusive, censorious, judgmental, and artificial—an elitist ideal inappropriate for an egalitarian society (a point made by John F. Kasson in Rudeness and Civility, 1990)—it contributed immensely, Bushman says, to American life: to architecture and the decorative arts but also, in fulfilling the many needs of aspiring gentility, to manufacturing, trade, commerce, education, and, especially, literacy, since the models for American refinement often were found in the novels of sensibility. The Americanization of gentility was, Bushman contends, the translation of a secular, leisured, and public ideal into a domestic one that encouraged religious practice and the work ethic. Resourceful,lucid, sweeping—a true and refining pleasure. (Photos—130—not seen.)

Kirkus Reviews