Whitewashing America

Even before mass marketing American consumers bought products that gentrified their households and broadcast their sense of “the good things in life.”<p>Bridging literary scholarship archeology history and art history <i>Whitewashing America: Material Culture and Race in the Antebellum Imagination</i> explores how material goods shaped antebellum notions of race class gender and purity.<P>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.”<p>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