Whitewashing America: Material Culture and Race in the Antebellum Imagination

by Bridget T. Heneghan

Overview

Even before mass marketing, American consumers bought products that gentrified their households and broadcast their sense of “the good things in life.”

Bridging literary scholarship, archeology, history, and art history, Whitewashing America: Material Culture and Race in the Antebellum Imagination explores how material goods shaped antebellum notions of race, class, gender, and purity.

From the Revolutionary Way until the Civil War, American consumers increasingly sought white-colored goods. Whites preferred mass-produced and specialized products, avoiding the former dark, course, low-quality products issued to slaves. White consumers surrounded themselves with refined domestic items, visual reminders of who they were, equating wealth, discipline, and purity with the racially “white.”

Clothing, paint, dinnerware, gravestones and buildings staked a visual contrast, a portable, visible title and deed segregating upper-class whites from their lower-class neighbors and househo

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781934110997
Publisher:	University Press of Mississippi
Publication date:	03/03/2008
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Bridget T. Heneghan, a lecturer in English at Vanderbilt University, has been published in Nineteenth-Century Studies.

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	ix
	Introduction	xi
1.	The Pot Calling the Kettle: White Goods and the Construction of Race in Antebellum America	3
2.	Living on White Bread: Class Considerations and the Refinement of Whiteness	44
3.	Unmentionable Things Unmentioned: Constructing Femininity with White Things	86
4.	See Spot Run: White Things in the Rhetoric of Racial, Moral, and Hygienic Purity	129
	Epilogue	165
	Notes	171
	Works Cited	183
	Index	199