Attitudes Toward Poverty and Wealth in Colonial America

FAIN: FT-13290-77

Virginia P. Bernhard
University of St. Thomas (Houston, TX 77006-4626)

To complete a book on the transformation and adaptation of English attitudes toward wealth, poverty, and social mobility in the New World which focusses primarily on seventeenth-century Virginia and Massachusetts. PI will subject the "success" literature in America and England in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to a detailed textual analysis to determine themes, assumptions, and ideology; and wherever possible to consider the social status/role of the author and the audience. PI intends to suggest some reasons for the stability of 18th century Virginia in contrast to the social tensions in Massachusetts at that time.