American Home Life, 1880-1930
American Home Life, 1880-1930

Author: Jessica H. Foy

Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press

Published: 1994-08

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 9780870498558

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"In the pivotal decades around the turn of the century, American domestic life underwent dramatic alteration. From backstairs to front stairs, spaces and the activities within them were radically affected by shifts in the larger social and material environments. This volume, while taking account of architecture and decoration, moves us beyond the study of buildings to the study of behaviors, particularly the behaviors of those who peopled the middle-class, single-family, detached American home between 1880 and 1930." "The book's contributors study transformations in services (such as home utilities of power, heat, light, water, and waste removal) in servicing (for example, the impact of home appliances such as gas and electric ranges, washing machines, and refrigerators), and in serving (changes in domestic servants' duties, hours of work, racial and ethnic backgrounds)." "In blending intellectual and home history, these essays both examine and exemplify the perennial American enthusiasm for, as well as anxiety about, the meaning of modernity."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The Arts and the American Home, 1890-1930
The Arts and the American Home, 1890-1930

Author: Jessica H. Foy

Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press

Published: 1995-07

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 9780870499074

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Between 1890 and 1930, the domestic arts, as well as the daily life of the American family, began to reflect rapid advances in technology, aesthetics, and attitudes about American culture. Pictorial, literary, musical, and decorative arts from this era all reveal a shift from clutter to clarity and from profusion to restraint as modern conveniences, ranging from pre-stamped needlework patterns to central heat, were introduced into the domestic environment. However, the household arts were also affected by an enduring strain of conservatism reflected in the popularity of historically inspired furnishing styles. In this collection of essays, ten experts in turn-of-the-century popular and material culture examine how the struggle between modernity and tradition was reflected in various facets of the household aesthetic. Their findings touch on sub-themes of gender, generation, and class to provide a fascinating commentary on what middle-class Americans were prepared to discard in the name of modernity and what they stubbornly retained for the sake of ideology. Through an examination of material culture and prescriptive literature from this period, the essayists also demonstrate how changes in artistic expression affected the psychological, social, and cultural lives of everyday Americans. This book joins a growing list of titles dedicated to analyzing and interpreting the cultural dimensions of past domestic life. Its essays shed new light on house history by tracking the transformation of a significant element of home life - its expressions of art.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 1880-1930
Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 1880-1930

Author: Patricia A. Schechter

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2003-01-14

Total Pages: 408

ISBN-13: 0807875465

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Pioneering African American journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931) is widely remembered for her courageous antilynching crusade in the 1890s; the full range of her struggles against injustice is not as well known. With this book, Patricia Schechter restores Wells-Barnett to her central, if embattled, place in the early reform movements for civil rights, women's suffrage, and Progressivism in the United States and abroad. Schechter's comprehensive treatment makes vivid the scope of Wells-Barnett's contributions and examines why the political philosophy and leadership of this extraordinary activist eventually became marginalized. Though forced into the shadow of black male leaders such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington and misunderstood and then ignored by white women reformers such as Frances E. Willard and Jane Addams, Wells-Barnett nevertheless successfully enacted a religiously inspired, female-centered, and intensely political vision of social betterment and empowerment for African American communities throughout her adult years. By analyzing her ideas and activism in fresh sharpness and detail, Schechter exposes the promise and limits of social change by and for black women during an especially violent yet hopeful era in U.S. history.

The Ahern Home of Texarkana
The Ahern Home of Texarkana

Author: Doris Douglas Davis

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

Published: 2024-09-02

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 1648431992

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Focused on an early twentieth-century home in Texarkana, Arkansas, Doris Douglas Davis’s The Ahern Home of Texarkana offers not only a discussion of the architecture of a Classical Revival dwelling but also provides a closely observed account of the material culture and social structures of a particular time and place in the American South. Built in 1905–1906 by Patrick Ahern, who immigrated to the United States from Dungarvan, Ireland, in 1881, the house at 403 Laurel Street was home to Ahern, his wife Mary, their six children, and a variety of descendants for over a century before its acquisition by the Texarkana Museums System in 2011. Today, the house, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, serves as a writing retreat, music center, and venue for historical presentations and educational activities. Based on archival materials, interviews with members of the family and those who knew them, and other research, Davis’s examination of the home and its inhabitants also includes a discussion of the complex relationship between persons of privilege such as the Aherns and the domestic servants, predominantly African American, whose often-arduous work made possible the smooth functioning of the household within its social context in the Jim Crow South. Describing the “fraught” relationships in the South between Black domestic servants and their white employers, Davis presents evidence of “the inevitable despair wrought by inequality and the tremendous capacity of the human heart to love.” This detailed tour of the home, its construction and furnishings, and the socio-historical context of its day-to-day activities provides readers a window of understanding and appreciation that will inform students and scholars of material culture as well as those interested in historical preservation.

At Home in Nineteenth-Century America
At Home in Nineteenth-Century America

Author: Amy G. Richter

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2015-01-23

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 0814769136

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Few institutions were as central to nineteenth-century American culture as the home. Emerging in the 1820s as a sentimental space apart from the public world of commerce and politics, the Victorian home transcended its initial association with the private lives of the white, native-born bourgeoisie to cross lines of race, ethnicity, class, and region. Throughout the nineteenth century, home was celebrated as a moral force, domesticity moved freely into the worlds of politics and reform, and home and marketplace repeatedly remade each other. At Home in Nineteenth-Century America draws upon advice manuals, architectural designs, personal accounts, popular fiction, advertising images, and reform literature to revisit the variety of places Americans called home. Entering into middle-class suburban houses, slave cabins, working-class tenements, frontier dugouts, urban settlement houses, it explores the shifting interpretations and experiences of these spaces from within and without. Nineteenth-century homes and notions of domesticity seem simultaneously distant and familiar. This sense of surprise and recognition is ideal for the study of history, preparing us to view the past with curiosity and empathy, inspiring comparisons to the spaces we inhabit today—malls, movie theaters, city streets, and college campuses. Permitting us to listen closely to the nineteenth century’s sweeping conversation about home in its various guises, At Home in Nineteenth-Century America encourages us to hear our contemporary conversation about the significance and meaning of home anew while appreciating the lingering imprint of past ideals. Instructor's Guide

The Flamingo in the Garden
The Flamingo in the Garden

Author: Colleen J. Sheehy

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-12-12

Total Pages: 122

ISBN-13: 100052552X

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First published in 1996 Documents a wide range of American yard art and distills from it insights into attitudes and values about places, homes, neighborhoods, communities, mediating relationships between culture and nature, negotiate consumer culture, and reusing and individualizing mass- produced things.

Homeless Lives in American Cities
Homeless Lives in American Cities

Author: P. Webb

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2014-08-07

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 1137405643

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Homeless Lives in American Cities explores how the American discourse on homelessness arose from Victorian social and political anxieties about the impacts of immigration and urbanization on the middle class family. It demonstrates how contemporary social work and policy emerge from Victorian cultural attitudes.

Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in Modern America
Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in Modern America

Author: Elizabeth Fraterrigo

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2009-11-05

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 0190452633

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Launched by Hugh Hefner in 1953, Playboy promoted an image of the young, affluent, single male-the man about town ensconced in a plush bachelor pad, in constant pursuit of female companionship and a good time. Spectacularly successful, this high-gloss portrait of glamorous living and sexual adventure would eventually draw some one million readers each month. Exploring the world created in the pages of America's most widely read and influential men's magazine, Elizabeth Fraterrigo sets Playboy's history in the context of a society in transition. Sexual mores, gender roles, family life, notions of consumption and national purpose-all were in flux as Americans adjusted to the prosperity that followed World War II. Initially, Playboy promised only "entertainment for men," but Fraterrigo reveals that its vision of abundance, pleasure, and individual freedom soon placed the magazine at the center of mainstream debates about sex and freedom, politics and pleasure in postwar America. She shows that for Hugh Hefner, the "good life" meant the "playboy life," in which expensive goods and sexually available women were plentiful, obligations were few, and if one worked hard enough, one could enjoy abundant leisure and consumption. In support of this view, Playboy attacked early marriage, traditional gender arrangements, and sanctions against premarital sex. The magazine also promoted private consumption as a key to economic growth and national well-being, offering tips from "The Playboy Advisor" on everything from high-end stereos and cuff-links to caviar and wine. If we want to understand post-war America, Fraterrigo shows, we must pay close attention to Playboy, its messages about pleasure and freedom, the debates it inspired, and the criticism it drew--all of which has been bound up in the popular culture and consumer society that surround us.