The American Bourgeoisie - Distinction and Identity in the Nineteenth Century (Hardcover)

"Nowhere in the world did a bourgeoisie emerge as influential as that in the nineteenth-century United States. This group of upper class men and women combined familiar forms of economic might and political power with new forms of cultural clout, creating institutional structures, architectural designs, and aesthetic models that continue to shape our lives today, from the foodstuffs we fancy to the art collections we admire. How bourgeois Americans established a dominant class culture and forged a common cultural vocabulary is the subject of this volume"--