The Politics of Taste in Antebellum Charleston

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UNC 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

Introduction
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
7 The Gothic Revival
195
8 Life in the Yard
240
9 A Love of Display
277
Epilogue
327
Notes
333
Bibliography
369
Index
387
Copyright

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Informazioni sull'autore (2015)

Maurie D. McInnis is assistant professor of art history at the University of Virginia. She is coauthor of In Pursuit of Refinement: Charlestonians Abroad, 1740-1860.

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