Reviews for The refinement of America : persons, houses, cities
Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.
The evangelists of elegance found surprisingly eager converts in early America. A distinguished historian here recounts the remarkable spread of decorative architecture, delicate manners, polished conversation, genteel literature, ~courtly dancing, and fine linens at a time when most families still struggled for subsistence in a raw land. Beginning in the early eighteenth century, the arts of refinement attracted American adherents trying to secure their status in a still inchoate society. For many, the revolution against the British monarchy required no subsequent repudiation of the cultural standards derived from royal courts. But pretensions of refinement did create tensions and confusions in an egalitarian republic. Nor could the devout always find an easy reconciliation between the demands of conviction and the appeals of gentility. And even while venerating women as the presiding spirits in the home parlor, men transferred their real allegiance to the factory, club, and office. Told with clarity and intelligence, this is the story of an American civilization trying to find its way between barbarism and snobbery. ~--Bryce Christensen
Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
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.)
Library Journal
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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. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Choice
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
American gentility: a contradiction in terms? Bushman does not think so, although he acknowledges that the aristocratically rooted notions that segregate culture from work and elevate conduct into refined performance have their difficulties in societies committed to republicanism. He imaginatively uses the tools and insights of social historians and material culturalists to map the rise of gentility after 1690 in the Colonial gentry and then in the growing American middle classes. Gentility did not support middle-class interests in the 19th century as well as it had supported gentry authority in the 18th. Refinement, Bushman argues persuasively, nonetheless complicated conventional class distinctions, shaped American Protestantism, and provided a market for consumer goods large enough to spur on industrialization. By surveying the whole US across a century and a half, Bushman must stroke broadly and selectively. He outlines the gradual gentrification of house, town, and city plans largely within the Middle Atlantic to New England regions, and deftly sketches in memorable anecdotes of the parlor life of the classes and groups being refined. This well-written essay will engage a wide range of students of American studies. General; advanced undergraduate; graduate; faculty. J. L. Cooper; DePauw University
Publishers Weekly
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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.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
