Bowing to Necessities: A History of Manners in America, 1620-1860

Bowing to Necessities: A History of Manners in America, 1620-1860. By C. Dallett Hemphill. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. x, 310 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-19-512557-6.)

C. Dallett Hemphill is by no means the first American historian to claim that manners constitute "a street-level panorama of how contemporaries thought society was organized, how power was actually distributed, and how larger changes in cosmology, polity, or economy were being worked out in everyday life." Nor is she the first to examine the history of manners through the large number of etiquette and general conduct advice books made available to Americans during the generations of colonial and early national development. What she offers in Bowing to Necessities is the most thorough reading of this literature, spanning the longest time, from which she derives the most provocative reinterpretations of the pace and meanings of change...