Provincial Lives: Middle-Class Experience in the Antebellum Middle West

by Timothy R. Mahoney

• ISBN13: 9780521025430
• ISBN10: 0521025435
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-03-30
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Provincial Lives tells the story of the development of a regional middle class in the antebellum Middle West. It traces the efforts of waves of Americans to transmit their social structures, behavior, and values to the West and construct a distinctive regional middle-class culture on the urban frontier. Intertwining local, regional, and national history with social, immigration, gender and urban history, Mahoney examines how a succession of settlers from "good" society--farmers, entrepreneurs, professionals, and "genteel" men and women from the urban East--interacted with, accommodated, and compromised with those already there to construct a middle-class society.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. The structure of provincial society: Native American, French, and American interaction in the Upper Mississippi River Valley

2. Family migration and social development on a 'Near Frontier'

3. 'A Common Band of Brotherhood': migration, male subcultures, the booster ethos, and the origins of urban middle class

4. The gentility system in the West

5. 'Brethren of the bar': Professional culture among lawyers and the regional process of elite aggregation

6. Boosters and railroad men: Constructing a regional society

Epilogue

Appendices

Notes

Selected bibliography

Index.