| FT-57907-10 | Research Programs: Summer Stipends | Christina Jayne Hodge | A Genteel Revolution: Practical Refinements of New England's Middling Sorts | 5/1/2010 - 9/30/2010 | $6,000.00 | Christina | Jayne | Hodge | | | | Stanford University | Cambridge | MA | 02138-2019 | USA | 2010 | U.S. History | Summer Stipends | Research Programs | 6000 | 0 | 6000 | 0 |
How did refined practices that were exclusive at the start eighteenth century become common necessity by its end, transforming values into the 19th century and beyond? The manuscript revision project A Genteel Revolution broaches this question through the life of Elizabeth Pratt, an American widow and shopkeeper from early eighteenth-century Newport, Rhode Island. Pratt left an unusually rich material and documentary legacy. Her life provides compelling evidence that middling sorts re-made gentility into a social practice that was successful even when partial. This conclusion offers a new perspective on lived status and the mythos of colonial gentility: it undermines any idea of a singular, essential elite culture against which others were measured. |