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.
關於作者:
Richard Lyman Bushman, Gouverneur Morris Professor of History,
Emeritus, at Columbia University, grew up in Portland, Oregon, and
earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees from Harvard
University. He has also taught at Brigham Young University, Boston
University, and the University of Delaware. His From Puritan to
Yankee: Character and Social Order in Connecticut,
1690–1765 won the Bancroft Prize in 1967. His other
books include Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism
1984, winner of the Evans Biography Award; King and People in
Provincial Massachusetts 1985; and The Refinement of
America: Persons, Houses, Cities 1992. A practicing Mormon,
he lives in New York City with his wife, Claudia.