Decorum


Book Description







Rudeness and Civility


Book Description

With keen insight and subtle humor, John F. Kasson explores the history and politics of etiquette from America's colonial times through the nineteenth century. He describes the transformation of our notion of "gentility," once considered a birthright to some, and the development of etiquette as a middle-class response to the new urban and industrial economy and to the excesses of democratic society.




Savory Suppers and Fashionable Feasts


Book Description

Williams (history, Fitchburg State College) investigates Victorian eating customs, cooking methods, and foodstuffs, revealing how genteel dining became an increasingly important means of achieving social stability, particularly for the middle class, during a period when Americans were faced with significant changes. Includes numerous recipes, bandw photographs, and drawings. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR




The American Bourgeoisie


Book Description

This volume engages a fundamental disciplinary question about this period in American history: how did the bourgeoisie consolidate their power and fashion themselves not simply as economic leaders but as cultural innovators and arbiters? It also explains how culture helped Americans form both a sense of shared identity and a sense of difference.




The Fat of the Land


Book Description

Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cooking for the year 2002. The subject is The Fat of the Land.




Debutante


Book Description

The social debut and its offshoots--the high school prom, the sorority presentation, beauty pageants--continue to emphasize celebrity, class, and community. But why does this peculiar tradition persist? In "Debutante," Marling demystifies debdom and the "long-term American hankering after the trappings of royalty."




Displaying Women


Book Description

Displaying Women explores the role of women in the representation of leisure in turn-of-the-century New York. To see and be seen--on Fifth Avenue and Broadway, in Central Park, and in the fashionable uptown hotels and restaurants--was one of the fundamental principles in the display aesthetic of New York's fashionable society. Maureen E. Montgomery argues for a reconsideration of the role of women in the bourgeois elite in turn-of-the-century America. By contrasting multiple images of women drawn from newspapers, magazines, private correspondence, etiquette manuals and the New York fiction of Edith Wharton, Henry James and others, she offers a convincing antidote to the long-standing tendency in women's history to overlook women whose class affiliations have put them in a position of power.




Classified Catalogue


Book Description