The Refinement of America

The Refinement of America PDF Author: Richard Lyman Bushman
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307761606
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 529

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Book Description
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.

The Refinement of America

The Refinement of America PDF Author: Richard Lyman Bushman
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307761606
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 529

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Our Own Snug Fireside

Our Own Snug Fireside PDF Author: Jane C. Nylander
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0307828166
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 627

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Book Description
This charming book portrays domestic life in New England during the century between the American Revolution and the Civil War. Drawing on diaries, letters, wills, newspapers, and other sources, Jane C. Nylander provides intimate details about preparing dinner, spinning and weaving textiles, washing and ironing laundry, planning a social outing, and exchanging food and services. Probing behind the many myths that have grown up about this era, Nylander reveals the complex reality of everyday life in old New England.

In Pursuit of Refinement

In Pursuit of Refinement PDF Author: Maurie D. McInnis
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781570033148
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A fully illustrated art catalogue that exemplifies Charlestonians' fascination with European culture.

Reset

Reset PDF Author: Stephen Kinzer
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1429948280
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
“A stern critique of American foreign policy and a concise, colorful, and compelling modern history of Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Israel.” —NPR Reset introduces an astonishing parade of characters: sultans, shahs, oil tycoons, mullahs, women of the world, liberators, oppressors, and dreamers of every sort. Woven together into a dazzling panorama, they help us see the Middle East in a new way—and lead to startling proposals for how the world’s most volatile region might be transformed. In this paradigm-shifting book, Stephen Kinzer argues that the United States needs to break out of its Cold War mindset and find new partners in the Middle East. Only two Muslim countries in the Middle East have experience with democracy: Iran and Turkey. They are logical partners for the United States. Besides proposing this new “power triangle,” Kinzer tells the turbulent story of America’s relations with Israel and Saudi Arabia, its traditional partners in the Middle East, and argues that those relations must be reshaped to fit the new realities of the twenty-first century. Kinzer’s provocative new view of the Middle East—and of America’s role there—will richly entertain while moving a vital policy debate beyond the stale alternatives of the last fifty years. Praise for Reset “A radical new course for the United States in the region.” —Foreign Affairs “Intriguing.” —The Economist “Fresh and well informed. . . . [A] lively, character-driven approach to history.” —The Washington Post

Overthrow

Overthrow PDF Author: Stephen Kinzer
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0805082409
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
An award-winning author tells the stories of the audacious American politicians, military commanders, and business executives who took it upon themselves to depose monarchs, presidents, and prime ministers of other countries with disastrous long-term consequences.

The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America

The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America PDF Author: Jennifer Van Horn
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469629577
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 457

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Book Description
Over the course of the eighteenth century, Anglo-Americans purchased an unprecedented number and array of goods. The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America investigates these diverse artifacts—from portraits and city views to gravestones, dressing furniture, and prosthetic devices—to explore how elite American consumers assembled objects to form a new civil society on the margins of the British Empire. In this interdisciplinary transatlantic study, artifacts emerge as key players in the formation of Anglo-American communities and eventually of American citizenship. Deftly interweaving analysis of images with furniture, architecture, clothing, and literary works, Van Horn reconstructs the networks of goods that bound together consumers in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston. Moving beyond emulation and the desire for social status as the primary motivators for consumption, Van Horn shows that Anglo-Americans' material choices were intimately bound up with their efforts to distance themselves from Native Americans and African Americans. She also traces women's contested place in forging provincial culture. As encountered through a woman's application of makeup at her dressing table or an amputee's donning of a wooden leg after the Revolutionary War, material artifacts were far from passive markers of rank or political identification. They made Anglo-American society.

Solitary Refinement

Solitary Refinement PDF Author: Nadina Mackie Jackson
Publisher: FriesenPress
ISBN: 152557566X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
A musician’s journey never ends, and the work is often solitary. Fortunately for bassoonists, Solitary Refinement can be a trusted companion throughout their musical career, replete with exercises adaptable by bassoon students who are still developing their skills, all the way to virtuosi seeking to perfect their craft. Drawing on her extensive career as a professional bassoonist and teacher, Nadina Mackie Jackson has assembled a comprehensive volume of technical exercises for the serious bassoonist. This book covers chromatic scales in many permutations and intervals, diatonic scales and chords, and exercises designed to strengthen fundamental basics, such as fingering, embouchure, double tonguing, vibrato, tuning and tone quality. In elegant, accessible prose, Nadina Mackie Jackson also shares her wisdom on the importance and philosophy of technical practice, with sensible advice on how to build good habits. Beyond the exercises, this book also serves as a guide for bassoonists on how to set personal goals and develop a sustained practice that will nurture their musical growth over a lifetime. Solitary Refinement is designed for the seriously committed bassoonist of any age to maintain, develop and expand their command of the bassoon, and will inspire players to see themselves in a world that combines musical passion and fundamental discipline.

Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?

Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? PDF Author: John Fea
Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
ISBN: 1611640881
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Fea offers an even-handed primer on whether America was founded to be a Christian nation, as many evangelicals assert, or a secular state, as others contend. He approaches the title's question from a historical perspective, helping readers see past the emotional rhetoric of today to the recorded facts of our past. Readers on both sides of the issues will appreciate that this book occupies a middle ground, noting the good points and the less-nuanced arguments of both sides and leading us always back to the primary sources that our shared American history comprises.

Joseph Smith

Joseph Smith PDF Author: Richard Lyman Bushman
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1400077532
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 786

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Book Description
Founder of the largest indigenous Christian church in American history, Joseph Smith published the 584-page Book of Mormon when he was twenty-three and went on to organize a church, found cities, and attract thousands of followers before his violent death at age thirty-eight. Richard Bushman, an esteemed cultural historian and a practicing Mormon, moves beyond the popular stereotype of Smith as a colorful fraud to explore his personality, his relationships with others, and how he received revelations. An arresting narrative of the birth of the Mormon Church, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling also brilliantly evaluates the prophet’s bold contributions to Christian theology and his cultural place in the modern world.

Listed

Listed PDF Author: Joe Roman
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674061276
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
Main description: The first listed species to make headlines after the Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973 was the snail darter, a three-inch fish that stood in the way of a massive dam on the Little Tennessee River. When the Supreme Court sided with the darter, Congress changed the rules. The dam was built, the river stopped flowing, and the snail darter went extinct on the Little Tennessee, though it survived in other waterways. A young Al Gore voted for the dam; freshman congressman Newt Gingrich voted for the fish. A lot has changed since the 1970s, and Joe Roman helps us understand why we should all be happy that this sweeping law is alive and well today. More than a general history of endangered species protection, Listed is a tale of threatened species in the wild-from the whooping crane and North Atlantic right whale to the purple bankclimber, a freshwater mussel tangled up in a water war with Atlanta-and the people working to save them. Employing methods from the new field of ecological economics, Roman challenges the widely held belief that protecting biodiversity is too costly. And with engaging directness, he explains how preserving biodiversity can help economies and communities thrive. Above all, he shows why the extinction of species matters to us personally-to our health and safety, our prosperity, and our joy in nature.