The Politics of Taste in Antebellum CharlestonUNC Press Books, 1 dic 2015 - 424 pagine At the close of the American Revolution, Charleston, South Carolina, was the wealthiest city in the new nation, with the highest per-capita wealth among whites and the largest number of enslaved residents. Maurie D. McInnis explores the social, political, and material culture of the city to learn how--and at what human cost--Charleston came to be regarded as one of the most refined cities in antebellum America. While other cities embraced a culture of democracy and egalitarianism, wealthy Charlestonians cherished English notions of aristocracy and refinement, defending slavery as a social good and encouraging the growth of southern nationalism. Members of the city's merchant-planter class held tight to the belief that the clothes they wore, the manners they adopted, and the ways they designed house lots and laid out city streets helped secure their place in social hierarchies of class and race. This pursuit of refinement, McInnis demonstrates, was bound up with their determined efforts to control the city's African American majority. She then examines slave dress, mobility, work spaces, and leisure activities to understand how Charleston slaves negotiated their lives among the whites they served. The textures of lives lived in houses, yards, streets, and public spaces come into dramatic focus in this lavishly illustrated portrait of antebellum Charleston. McInnis's innovative history of the city combines the aspirations of its would-be nobility, the labors of the African slaves who built and tended the town, and the ambitions of its architects, painters, writers, and civic promoters. |
Sommario
1 | |
1 A BirdsEye View | 17 |
2 A Walking Tour | 31 |
3 The Public Landscape of Racial Control | 66 |
4 Temples for Posterity | 90 |
5 Public Art and Politics | 128 |
6 Ordering the Backlot | 160 |
Color plates | 180 |
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Academy African American Aiken Aiken-Rhett House American Buildings Survey antebellum antebellum period architect architectural aristocracy Art/Carolina Art Association artists backlot brick built Calhoun carriage house Charleston County Charlestonians Church city’s classical College of Charleston Courtesy cultural Denmark Vesey drawing room elite English enslaved Family Papers Figure Fraser Gibbes Museum Gothic Revival Gourdin Grimball Hall Hibernian Hiram Powers Historic American Buildings interior Inventories Joel Roberts Poinsett John kitchen building Library of Congress lived Manigault master Meeting Street ment Middleton Miles Brewton House Nullification Crisis ornamental outbuildings owners paintings Pease percent Philip’s Photographs Division piazza Pinckney plantation planters political portrait Prints and Photographs proslavery quoted Ralph Izard refinement residents Robert Samuel F. B. Morse SCHS servants Severens single house slaveowners slavery slaves Smith social South Carolina Southern structures taste Thomas Thomas Pinckney tion ton’s tonians upper class urban Vanderhorst visitors William yard