In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

161 NOTES Preface 1. Raymond Williams charts the complicated history of the word and shows how “culture”—elusive, malleable, and multifaceted—embraced a range of attitudes over time. The Latin colere means to protect, honor, inhabit, and cultivate; culter refers to a plowshare, a tool used to tend crops. Metaphors of growth and development continued to inhere in the word. Culture controlled nature, arguably its antithesis (though now even the idea of nature is perceived as a cultural byproduct). The word “culture” became more controversial in the late nineteenth century. Matthew Arnold sharpened it with a contrast to “anarchy” and provided a gloss: “the best that has been thought and said in the world.” The word also connotes civility , an understanding of polite behavior and social order. Of course, anthropologists came to use “culture” in a less normative, more descriptive sense, to mean a people’s particular way of life. Terry Eagleton attempts to unravel the entwined meanings, concluding that “culture is not only what we live by” but also, in great measure, “what we live for.” See Raymond Williams , Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 76–82; Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994 [1869]); and Terry Eagleton, The Idea of Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 1–31, 131. 2. David D. Hall, manuscript chapter on “learned culture” for the ongoing A History of the Book in America, vol. 3., The Industrial Book, 1840–1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press/American Antiquarian Society, 2007). Hall makes this point: “In 1800 no one in the English-speaking world used ‘culture’ in the sense that was becoming commonplace when Thomas Wentworth Higginson published ‘A Plea for Culture’ in The Atlantic Monthly in 1867. In this and parallel essays Higginson insisted on the importance of the artist and of the arts, literary and visual, for a society that was overly materialistic, too accepting of ‘mediocrity,’ and obsessed with money-making.” I thank Professor Hall for sharing his work-in-progress years ago. 3. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), esp. 53–54. 4. For two general discussions of cultural authority, see T. J. Jackson Lears, “The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities,” American Quarterly 90 (June 1985): 567– 593; and Michael Schudson, “Paper Tigers: A Sociologist Follows Cultural Studies into the Wilderness,” Lingua Franca (August 1997): 49–56. 5. Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Random House, 1992), 409; and Bushman, “American High-Style and Vernacular Cultures,” in Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era ed. Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 309. Bushman also writes persuasively of the alchemy of capitalism and refinement that resulted in consumer culture. 6. Alan Wallach, Exhibiting Contradiction: Essays on the Art Museum in the United States (Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), esp. 15. 7. Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988); Paul DiMaggio, “Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston,” pts. 1 and 2, in Media, Culture, and Society: A Critical Reader, ed. Richard Collins et al. (London: Sage Publications, 1986), 194–211, 303–322. 8. Again, for alternative approaches to similar material, see DiMaggio’s “Cultural Entrepreneurship ” and Levine’s Highbrow/Lowbrow. See also Lillian Miller, Patrons and Patriotism: The Encouragement of the Fine Arts in the United States, 1790–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966); and Ronald Story, “Class and Culture in Boston: The Athenaeum, 1807– 1860,” American Quarterly 27 (May 1975): 178–199. I am indebted to Professor Story’s article for helping me refine my own thesis. 9. In “Class and Culture in Boston,” Ronald Story emphasizes only one use: class consolidation . 10. The launching of the Boston Athenaeum features a remarkably close cast of characters, so a number of men and women reappear throughout the text. For example, George Ticknor appears as a minor name in Chapter 1 but plays a much larger role in Chapter 6. And Joseph Buckminster is integral to Chapters 1, 2, and 3. Introduction 1. Russel Blaine Nye, The Cultural Life of the New Nation: 1776–1830 (New York: Harper, 1960). See also Howard Mumford Jones and Bessie Zaban Jones, eds., The Many Voices of Boston: A Historical Anthology, 1630–1975 (Boston: Little, Brown / Atlantic Monthly...

Share