Author: Michał Rozbicki

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 9780813917504

Examining the American planters' aspirations from the perspective of cultural theory and in the comparative context of a larger British world, Rozbicki asserts that for this emerging elite, the genteel quest was the only feasible route to identity and authority: it became a central dynamic of their lives, crucial to their ambitious struggles with provincialism and the metropolitan condescension toward colonial "upstarts." The author also shows how this determined quest played a vital but little-understood role in the construction of a new American identity, as the European model enabled the colonial elite to achieve sufficient maturity, confidence, and pride in their virtues and rights to defy the British in the 1770s. Originally asserting the gentlemanly ideals of liberty and equality against the British crown, Revolutionary gentry inadvertently cultivated them in the fertile ground of nonelite culture.