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"United States-Social life and customs-1783-1865"
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Aristocracy in America : from the sketch-book of a German nobleman
\"Francis J. Grund, a German emigrant, was one of the most influential journalists in America in the three decades preceding the Civil War. He also wrote several books, including Aristocracy in America (1839), a fictional, satiric travel memoir written in response to Alexis de Tocqueville's famous Democracy in America. However, Grund's political work and life have never been analyzed in depth. In his introduction to this long out-of-print work, Armin Mattes provides a thorough account of Grund's dynamic engagement in American political life, and brings to light many of Grund's reflections on American social and political life previously published only in German. Comparing Aristocracy in America with Tocqueville's Democracy in America, Mattes shows how Grund's work can expand our understanding of the emerging democratic political culture and society in the antebellum United States\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
In the Looking Glass
Focusing on how mirrors were acquired in America and by whom, as well as the profound influence mirrors had, both individually and collectively, on the groups that embraced them, In the Looking Glass is a piece of innovative textual and visual scholarship.
eBook
In the looking glass : mirrors and identity in early America
\"In the Looking Glass explores how mirrors shaped human identity in North America from the earliest European explorations through the nineteenth century. Early Americans--African, Native, and European--had uses for and beliefs about reflective surfaces, largely associating reflection with ritual and magic, which predated the introduction of accurately reflective mirrors (ca. 1500). These new mirrors played a critical role in shaping a person's individual sense of self and came to be intimately linked to identity formation in early America. Moreover, mirrors became an object through which white men asserted their claims to modernity, emphasizing mirrors as fulcrums of truth that enabled them to know and master themselves and their world. In claiming that mirrors revealed and substantiated their own enlightenment and rationality, white men sought to differentiate how they used mirrors from not only white women but also from Native American and African American men and women. Mirrors thus played an important role in the construction of early American racial and gender hierarchies. This project brings together the history of technology and the history of identity, using textual, visual, and material sources to focus on how mirrors were created, adopted, adapted, and discussed by a wide variety of early Americans. In the Looking Glass will attract a wide audience of scholars from history, African American studies, Native American studies, material studies, history of technology, and gender studies, as well as a broader audience concerned with questions of image and identity\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
The week : a history of the unnatural rhythms that made us who we are
We take the seven-day week for granted, rarely asking what anchors it or what it does to us. Yet weeks are not dictated by the natural order. They are, in fact, an artificial construction of the modern world. With meticulous archival research that draws on a wide array of sources - including newspapers, restaurant menus, theater schedules, marriage records, school curricula, folklore, housekeeping guides, courtroom testimony, and diaries - David Henkin reveals how our current devotion to weekly rhythms emerged in the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century.
Book
Dancing to the precipice : the life of Lucie de la Tour du Pin, eyewitness to an era
Shares the story of a turn-of-the-nineteenth-century social chronicler, from her early years among the French and British nobility to her first-hand witness to such events as the demise of the French monarchy and the Reign of Terror.
Book