Provincial Lives

Provincial Lives tells the story of the development of a regional middle class in the antebellum Middle West. It traces the efforts of waves of Americans to transmit their social structures behavior and values to the West and construct a distinctive regional middle-class culture on the urban frontier. Intertwining local regional and national history with social immigration gender and urban history Mahoney examines how a succession of settlers from good society--farmers entrepreneurs professionals and genteel men and women from the urban East--interacted with accommodated and compromised with those already there to construct a middle-class society.