Bowing to Necessities

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?"--BOOK JACKET. "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 concerns found in contemporary diaries and letters. C. Dallett Hemphill also illuminates crucial connections between evolving class, age, and gender relations."--BOOK JACKET.

First Sentence

Perhaps it was the prospect of the long and bumpy journey to New Hampshire that put Massachusetts Governor Joseph Dudley in a testy mood.

Subjects

Other Editions

• Bowing to Necessities: A History of Manners in America, 1620-1860Oxford University Press, USA1999-08-26
• Bowing to NecessitiesOxford University Press1999-01-01
• Bowing to NecessitiesEbsco Publishing1999-01-01
• Bowing To NecessitiesPaperbackDiane Pub Co1999-06-01
• Bowing to NecessitiesOxford University Press, USA2002-03-25