Books about Respectability from Amazon.com

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Price: $7.66 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In the early decades of the twentieth century, tens of thousands of African Americans arrived at Detroit's Michigan Central Station, part of the Great Migration of blacks who left the South seeking improved economic and political conditions in the urban North. The most visible of these migrants have been the male industrial workers who labored on the city's automobile assembly lines. African American women have largely been absent from traditional narratives of the Great Migration because they were excluded from industrial work. By placing these women at the center of her study, Victoria Wolcott reveals their vital role in shaping life in interwar Detroit.

Wolcott takes us into the speakeasies, settlement houses, blues clubs, storefront churches, employment bureaus, and training centers of Prohibition- and depression-era Detroit. There, she explores the wide range of black women's experiences, focusing particularly on the interactions between working- and middle-class women. As Detroit's black population grew exponentially, women not only served as models of bourgeois respectability, but also began to reshape traditional standards of deportment in response to the new realities of their lives. In so doing, Wolcott says, they helped transform black politics and culture. Eventually, as the depression arrived, female respectability as a central symbol of reform was supplanted by a more strident working-class activism..
Price: $23.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

With a well-earned reputation for tolerance of both prostitution and miscegenation, New Orleans became known as the Great Southern Babylon in antebellum times. Following the Civil War, a profound alteration in social and economic conditions gradually reshaped the city's sexual culture and erotic commerce. Historian Alecia P. Long traces sex in the Crescent City over fifty years, drawing from Louisiana Supreme Court case testimony to relate intriguing tales of people both obscure and famous whose relationships and actions exemplify the era.

Long uncovers a connection between the geographical segregation of prostitution and the rising tide of racial segregation. She offers a compelling explanation of how New Orleans's lucrative sex trade drew tourists from the Bible Belt and beyond even as a nationwide trend toward the commercialization of sex emerged. And she dispels the romanticized smoke and perfume surrounding Storyville to reveal in the reasons for its rise and fall a fascinating corner of southern history. The Great Southern Babylon portrays the complex mosaic of race, gender, sexuality, social class, and commerce in turn-of-the-twentieth-century New Orleans.

"Long brilliantly charts the historical roots and evolution of the culture of commercial sexuality in New Orleans. . . . The result is a landmark book all should read."—Darlene Clark Hine, coauthor of A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America..
Price: $15.98 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Over the past twenty years, questions concerning the nature of early modern European consumption have increasingly become the object of critical focus for historians, cultural theorists, and readers interested in the history of material cultures. Why did such changes arise? Did they create a consumer society in the 18th century? What relationships did they bear to the Industrial Revolution, to colonialism, and to modernization in general.

In Consumption and the Making of Respectability, historian Woodruff Smith focuses on the radical alterations that occurred between 1600 and 1800 in European consumption of commodities produced overseas: cotton and silk textiles, sugar, pepper, spices, coffee, tea, porcelain, and tobacco. In analyzing these trends of consumption, Smith provides an extremely significant and seldom-investigated process of cultural construction: the tying together of several distinct cultural patterns during this century to create a culture of respectability and its impact on popular culture, trade, politics, social dynamics, and literature.

This original and thoughtful work provides a comprehensive and much-needed understanding of the origins of modern consumption and all of its cultural implications..
Price: $24.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

On Providencia, a tiny island in the southwest Caribbean, the metaphor of "crab antics" is commonly used to illustrate the dynamics of social life. For Peter Wilson, who spent over a year on the island, crab antics became a key image in his attempt to identify and analyze the standards by which people judge each other's worth, and to explain how values of social differentiation provide a basis for social order. His findings and insights are presented in this vivid and readable study filled with the lives and language of the Providencians. Wilson examines Caribbean social life as a totality and in its own terms. In doing so, he describes a major dimension of Caribbean society that has been ignored in the literature: the pattern of values based on respectability, the drive toward stratification, reputation, the drive toward equality, and the dialectical relation between them. Wilson's other important and original contribution is his treatment of the men's groups that function as the psychological and political counterpart of the matrifocal household. Though primarily intended to offer a description and interpretation of the social life of Providencia, Crab Antics raises issues of critical importance to general anthropological theory..
Price: $735.41 [Notify me when price goes down.]

California during the gold rush was a place of disputed claims, shoot-outs, gambling halls, and prostitution; a place populated by that rough and rebellious figure, the forty-niner; in short, a place that seems utterly unconnected to middle-class culture In American Alchemy, however, Brian Roberts offers a surprising challenge to this assumption.

Roberts points to a long-neglected truth of the gold rush: many of the northeastern forty-niners who ventured westward were in fact middle-class in origin, status, and values. Tracing the experiences and adventures both of these men and of the "unseen" forty-niners—women who stayed back East while their husbands went out West—he shows that, whatever else the gold seekers abandoned on the road to California, they did not simply turn their backs on middle-class culture.

Ultimately, Roberts argues, the story told here reveals an overlooked chapter in the history of the formation of the middle class. While the acquisition of respectability reflects one stage in this history, he says, the gold rush constitutes a second stage—a rebellion against standards of respectability..
Price: $19.09 [Notify me when price goes down.]