Timothy R. Mahoney - Böcker

Provincial Lives, first published in 1999, tells the story of the development of a regional middle class in the antebellum Middle West. It traces the efforts of waves of Americans to transmit their social structures, behavior, and values to the West and construct a distinctive regional middle-class culture on the urban frontier. Intertwining local, regional, and national history, as well as social, immigration, gender and urban history, the author examines how a succession of settlers from 'good' society - farmers and entrepreneurs, followed by capitalists, professionals, and 'genteel' men and women from the urban East - interacted with, accommodated, and compromised with those already there to construct a middle-class society and culture. Provincial Lives explores social change through the lived experience of the actors themselves as they employed their understandings of self, gender, class, and culture to construct social order and contribute to the development of a western urban middle class while still remaining members of a national society and playing a role in shaping the emergence of middle-class culture across the United States.

This book analyzes, with unprecedented breadth and coverage, the development, maturation, growth, and sudden decline of a distinctive, regional urban economic system that developed along the upper Mississippi River north of St. Louis during the middle third of the nineteenth century. Between 1820 and the Civil War the upper Mississippi River valley was at the center of national and international attention. At the edge of the northern frontier, this area, known as 'The Great West,' was the destination of hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the East and from northern Europe. To many, its rich lands, temperate climate, and vast rivers offered an opportunity to establish a better life, as well as a chance to enter, if desired, the mainstream of American life. Drawing from a variety of methods used in historical geography, economic history, systems analysis, and social and urban history, Timothy Mahoney analyzes how early settlement patterns were affected by experience, climate, and geography and how they, in turn, shaped the initial patterns of economic, urban, and transportation development.

This book analyzes, with unprecedented breadth and coverage, the development, maturation, growth, and sudden decline of a distinctive, regional urban economic system that developed along the upper Mississippi River north of St. Louis during the middle third of the nineteenth century. Between 1820 and the Civil War the upper Mississippi River valley was at the center of national and international attention. At the edge of the northern frontier, this area, known as 'The Great West,' was the destination of hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the East and from northern Europe. To many, its rich lands, temperate climate, and vast rivers offered an opportunity to establish a better life, as well as a chance to enter, if desired, the mainstream of American life. Drawing from a variety of methods used in historical geography, economic history, systems analysis, and social and urban history, Timothy Mahoney analyzes how early settlement patterns were affected by experience, climate, and geography and how they, in turn, shaped the initial patterns of economic, urban, and transportation development.

Provincial Lives, first published in 1999, tells the story of the development of a regional middle class in the antebellum Middle West. It traces the efforts of waves of Americans to transmit their social structures, behavior, and values to the West and construct a distinctive regional middle-class culture on the urban frontier. Intertwining local, regional, and national history, as well as social, immigration, gender and urban history, the author examines how a succession of settlers from 'good' society - farmers and entrepreneurs, followed by capitalists, professionals, and 'genteel' men and women from the urban East - interacted with, accommodated, and compromised with those already there to construct a middle-class society and culture. Provincial Lives explores social change through the lived experience of the actors themselves as they employed their understandings of self, gender, class, and culture to construct social order and contribute to the development of a western urban middle class while still remaining members of a national society and playing a role in shaping the emergence of middle-class culture across the United States.

Although the framework of regionalist studies may seem to be crumbling under the weight of increasing globalization, this collection of seventeen essays makes clear that cultivating regionalism lies at the center of the humanist endeavor. With interdisciplinary contributions from poets and fiction writers, literary historians, musicologists, and historians of architecture, agriculture, and women, this volume implements some of the most innovative and intriguing approaches to the history and value of regionalism as a category for investigation in the humanities. In the volume's inaugural essay, Annie Proulx discusses landscapes in American fiction, comments on how she constructs characters, and interprets current literary trends. Edward Watts offers a theory of region that argues for comparisons of the United States to other former colonies of Great Britain, including New Zealand, Australia, and Canada. Whether considering a writer's connection to region or the idea of place in exploring what is meant by regionalism, these essays uncover an enduring and evolving concept. Although the approaches and disciplines vary, all are framed within the fundamental premise of the humanities: the search to understand what it means to be human.

Mahoney examines how members of the middle class from small cities across the great West were transformed by boom and bust, years of recession, and civil war. He argues that in their encounters with national economic forces, the national crisis in politics, and the Civil War, middle class people were cut adrift from the social identity that they had established in the 'face to face' communities of the 'hometowns' of the urban West. By grounding them in their hometown ethos, and understanding how the Panic of 1857 and the subsequent recession undermined their lives, the author provides important insights into how they encountered, responded to, and were changed by their experiences in the Civil War. Providing a rare view of social history through the framework of the Civil War, the author documents, in both breadth and depth, the dramatic change and development of modern life in nineteenth-century America.