The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities
Book Details
Author(s)Richard Lyman Bushman
PublisherVintage
ISBN / ASIN0679744142
ISBN-139780679744146
MarketplaceFrance 🇫🇷
Description
This lively and authoritative volume makes clear that the quest for taste and manners in America has been essential to the serious pursuit of a democratic culture. Spanning the material world from mansions and silverware to etiquette books, city planning, and sentimental novels, Richard L. Bushman shows how a set of values originating in aristocratic court culture gradually permeated almost every stratum of American society and served to prevent the hardening of class consciousness. A work of immense and richly nuanced learning, The Refinement of America newly illuminates every facet of both our artifacts and our values.



