Citation:
Abstract:
How did refined practices that were exclusive at the start of the eighteenth century become common necessity by its end, transforming American values into the nineteenth century and beyond? The life of Elizabeth Pratt, an English widow and shopkeeper who lived in Newport, Rhode Island, from about 1720 to 1750, both raises and addresses this vital question. The documentary and artifactual residues of Pratt’s life are remarkably rich. They provide compelling evidence for a revolutionary idea: contrary to entrenched assumptions about the "top-down" diffusion of gentility and refinement during the early modern period, gentility was effectively created and promulgated by non-elite people. Middling sorts’ selective material refinements—termed “partible refinements”—were locally defined with reference to widely shared values, creating ideological cohesion within a field of diverse improvisational practices. Despite the central importance of the middling sorts to cultural transformations of the eighteenth century—including consumerism, merchant capitalism, and urbanization—this is the first major study dedicated to the archaeology of their daily lives. In it, I argue that non-elite innovators laid the groundwork for the American middle class a hundred years earlier than commonly thought.