At Home in Nineteenth-Century America: A Documentary History
- ISBN-10
- 0814769144
- ISBN-13
- 9780814769140
- Category
- History
- Pages
- 272
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2015-01-23
- Publisher
- NYU Press
- Author
- Amy G. Richter
Description
Few institutions were as central to nineteenth-century American culture as the home. Emerging in the 1820s as a sentimental space apart from the public world of commerce and politics, the Victorian home transcended its initial association with the private lives of the white, native-born bourgeoisie to cross lines of race, ethnicity, class, and region. Throughout the nineteenth century, home was celebrated as a moral force, domesticity moved freely into the worlds of politics and reform, and home and marketplace repeatedly remade each other. At Home in Nineteenth-Century America draws upon advice manuals, architectural designs, personal accounts, popular fiction, advertising images, and reform literature to revisit the variety of places Americans called home. Entering into middle-class suburban houses, slave cabins, working-class tenements, frontier dugouts, urban settlement houses, it explores the shifting interpretations and experiences of these spaces from within and without. Nineteenth-century homes and notions of domesticity seem simultaneously distant and familiar. This sense of surprise and recognition is ideal for the study of history, preparing us to view the past with curiosity and empathy, inspiring comparisons to the spaces we inhabit today—malls, movie theaters, city streets, and college campuses. Permitting us to listen closely to the nineteenth century’s sweeping conversation about home in its various guises, At Home in Nineteenth-Century America encourages us to hear our contemporary conversation about the significance and meaning of home anew while appreciating the lingering imprint of past ideals.
Get the book
Other editions
Similar books
-
The Boardinghouse in Nineteenth-Century America
By Wendy GamberQuinn “ went to Worcester on a ' spree ” ” ; Warren “ did not get home till late " ; Drury “ seem [ ed ] stupid , and partially intoxicated . ” 4 Many women complained of the “ servant problem , ” a difficulty fraught with class ...
-
Home Fires: How Americans Kept Warm in the Nineteenth Century
By Sean P. AdamsThis perspective allows a unique view of the development of an industrial society not just from the ground up but from the hearth up.
-
Listening to Nineteenth-century America
By Mark Michael SmithOn southern masters as economically modern but politically conservative , see Mark M. Smith , Mastered by the Clock ; Genovese , Slaveholders ' Dilemma . PART 1 1. Huger quoted in Bowman , " Antebellum Planters and Vormärz Junkers ...
-
A House Divided: The Civil War and Nineteenth-Century America
By Jonathan Daniel Wells“In this one particular aspect,” Rebecca Latimer Felton, a white Georgian, later wrote, slavery doomed itself. When white men put their own offspring 16 SLAVERY AND THE LONG-TERM ROOTS OF CIVIL WAR.
-
Suburban Plots: Men at Home in Nineteenth-Century American Print Culture
By Maura D'AmoreHow print culture helped men create and manage a new lifestyle between the city and the country
-
The Routledge History of Nineteenth-Century America
By Jonathan Daniel Wells... Red Dreams, White Nightmares: Pan-Indian Alliances in the Anglo-American Mind (Norman, 2015), on the fears of pan-Indian “conspiracies” that led white officials to isolate and coerce the TransAppalachian Indian nations.
-
Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Discourse of Natural History
By Juliana ChowSee also John Bellamy Foster, Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000). 29. Marsh's work follows in the tradition of physical geographers such as Alexander von Humboldt, whose Cosmos (1845, 1847; ...
-
Artisans Into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth-century America
By Bruce LaurieIn the only modern study synthesizing nineteenth-century American labor history, Bruce Laurie examines the character of working-class factionalism, plebian expectations of government, and relations between the organized few and the ...
-
A Companion to 19th-Century America
By William BarneyIntended for scholars, students, and general readers of modern American history, this volume stands alone in providing a historiographical overview of nineteenth-century America that is both complete in its coverage and cutting-edge in its ...
-
Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America
By Karen LystraPhiladelphia: Carey, Lea and Carey, 1828 (first American ed., with additions). Acton, William. The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs in Childhood, Youth, Adult Age, and Advanced Life Considered in Their Physiological, ...