In 1774 Virginia's last Royal Governor, Lord Dunmore, predicted that the social tensions in Virginia society would end the fomenting rebellion. For a decade the gentry had contended with a series of scandals that diminished their standing as the social, political and moral leaders of the colony. Three scandals, in particular, heightened freeholder scrutiny of Virginia leaders.;Richard Henry Lee quickly stepped to the forefront in 1765 and became the popular leader of the Stamp Act resistance. The revelation that he had applied for the position of Stamp Collector shocked many. He appeared as a self-interested charlatan. Then, in 1766, Speaker of the House of Burgesses and Treasurer of Virginia, John Robinson, died. On settling the Treasury accounts, officials discovered a {dollar}{rcub}100,000 discrepancy. Robinson had handed out the Colony's money as favors to his political allies. Then on the heels of this came a third scandal. Colonel John Chiswell murdered a merchant. For a time it appeared that gentry privilege would prevent the execution of justice. The charlatan, embezzler and murderer provided a focus for challenging the social, political and moral authority of Virginia's ruling class. In the years before 1775, it appeared to many observers that Virginia's gentry teetered on the brink. Threatened from outside Virginia by ever more stringent imperial measures, gentry found themselves under attack at home too as common folk questioned their authority.;What Dunmore did not understand were the measures gentry had taken in the years after 1773 to regain the support of their lessers. Gentry aligned themselves with symbols of the common folk. Gentlemen took up arms as private soldiers and demonstrated their willingness to fight, if need be, for Virginia's liberty. They granted concessions to religious dissenters. Gentlemen aligned themselves with common folk against the merchant class. When the conflict came, Dunmore's "class war" never materialized. What is more, his efforts to spawn it by granting freedom to the slaves of rebels proved futile. Patriot gentlemen had effectively closed ranks with common Virginians against what they now perceived as a common threat: "slavery" imposed by Britain and an insurrection by Virginia's own slaves.

This study examines capitalism and cultural change in early New England. The research focuses on leading merchants in Boston and Salem, Massachusetts from the last third of the seventeenth century to 1760. During this period, merchants, royal officials, and professionals formed a prominent influential elite that refashioned the town landscape and social structure of colonial ports. Merchants adopted a new Anglo-American worldview that gradually supplanted Puritan spiritual and providential understanding of the world and, instead, emphasized visible, material characteristics as the source of value in science, commerce, and consumption. The resultant "world of goods," created a social marketplace where identity, shaped by owning and displaying high-style goods and genteel manners, could be purchased by anyone with money. Incorporating both exotic imports and foreign merchants, the new culture fostered capitalism and helped to dispel earlier conflicts over sectarian beliefs and ethnic origins that had plagued Boston and Salem. Thus, this study argues that it was consumption and a worldview that placed value in the material not Puritan asceticism, as sociologist Max Weber and his supporters insist, that initiated the spirit of modern capitalism.

This dissertation is a study of the American coffin, its origins, forms, and meanings especially with regard to its role in the integration of death in American society before 1870. Coffins have generally been ignored by material culture studies primarily because of our society's cultural uneasiness with the topic of death. Current American funeral and burial practices seem bizarre and ahistorical and have often been characterized as the result of twentieth-century commercial greed. However, coffins have a long history as important artifacts which American society has used to legitimize death in subtly different ways for generations. This study examines the first uses of coffins in seventeenth-century America and follows their development up to the consolidation of the field of funeral directing and the mass production of coffins in the years after the Civil War.;This dissertation will investigate the role of coffins as they developed through the interaction of three major cultural systems, Christianity, gentility, and modernity. Each had an influence on the form and meaning of coffins and on each other. The origins of coffins lie in the system of Christianity and its emphasis on the resurrection of the body. Although Christianity would continue to influence attitudes toward death, burial practices and coffin use underwent a process of secularization. This allowed other systems, primarily gentility, to incorporate coffins and burial.;Within the cultural system of gentility, coffins first served as an object of status for the gentry, but their role changed as the process of commercialization made decorated coffins more available to a greater number of Americans, and gentility was modified into respectability. Eventually the system of modernity incorporated coffin use, as mass marketing and production combined with technological innovations. This was exemplified by the introduction of the metallic burial case. By tracing the developments in coffins and burial and their role in cultural systems, we may better understand how American society was able to continually legitimize the institution of death and create a common understanding of experience.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.