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

by Timothy R. Mahoney

• ISBN13: 9780521640923
• ISBN10: 052164092X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-01-28
• 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

List of illustrations	vii	(2)
Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction	1	(12)
1 The structure of provincial society: Native American, French, and American interaction in the upper Mississippi river valley	13	(18)
2 Family migration and social development on a "near" frontier	31	(31)
The Hempsteads and Gratiots of St. Louis, 1804-1820	32	(7)
The Hempsteads and Gratiots on a "near" frontier, 1820-1840	39	(23)
3 "A common band of brotherhood": Migration, male subcultures, the booster ethos, and the origins of the urban middle class	62	(51)
Migration systems and the structuring of urban society	64	(8)
Keokuk, Iowa: Vigilantism and the booster network	72	(11)
Male subcultures and the booster ethos	83	(30)
4 The gentility system in the West	113	(55)
Recognizing gentility	115	(5)
Structuring gentility	120	(9)
Housekeeping and genteel space	129	(5)
The genteel set	134	(14)
Delineating gentility	148	(7)
Genteel family culture	155	(13)
5 "Brethren of the bar": Professional culture among lawyers and the regional process of elite aggregation	168	(45)
Fathers of the bar	169	(9)
Circuit riding and the social geography of law	178	(12)
At the state supreme court	190	(7)
"Brethren of the bar"	197	(16)
6 Boosters and railroad men: Constructing a regional society	213	(44)
The spatial dynamics of regional society	213	(4)
From lawyers to boosters to railroad men	217	(22)
Convention culture	239	(6)
Railroad society: Excursions, festivals, and jubilees	245	(12)
Epilogue	257	(6)
Appendices	263	(6)
Notes	269	(52)
Selected bibliography	321	(4)
Index	325