Bowing to Necessities: A History of Manners in America, 1620-1860

by C. Dallett Hemphill

Book Overview

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?...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195154088
• ISBN13: 9780195154085
• Release Date: April 2002
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Accessible, informative, and well written

Along with John F. Kasson's *Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America*, I found this book accessible, informative, sophisticated, and well written. These are the qualities that I look for in reading a book. While we tend to focus on the more obvious, the two books tell us a lot about the not-so-obvious in modern living. Reading etiquette and conduct books after having read these books proved a lot of fun and thoroughly enlightening.