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Bowing to Necessities: A History of Manners in America, 1620-1860
Bowing to Necessities A History of Manners in America 16201860 Author:C. Dallett Hemphill Anglo-Americans encountered profound cultural contradictions as they shifted from the seventeenth-century hierarchical and patriarchal society of the frontier to the modern and multi-class democracy of the mid-nineteenth century. How could the tradition of inequality be maintained in the socially leveling environment of the early colonial wilder... more »ness? And how could nineteenth-century Americans pretend to be equal in an increasingly unequal society? This volume answers such key questions by mining an overlooked yet telling resource: manners. Bowing to Necessities argues that manners gave Americans ritual solutions to central cultural problems by allowing them to act out--and thus reinforce--certain power relations at a time when such relations saw drastic change. Analyzing the many sermons, child-rearing guides, advice books, and etiquette manuals that taught our first citizens how to behave, this book connects these instructions to individual practices and personal concerns found in contemporary diaries and letters. A cultural history with a unique and fascinating perspective, C. Dallett Hemphill's wide-ranging study offers readers a full picture of America's social customs from colonial times to the Civil War.« less