"Your Former Selves and Your Present State:" Identity and Domestic Landscape in Upper Georgia, 1780-1815
- UNCG Author/Contributor (non-UNCG co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)
- Ryan Fredrick Mails (Creator)
- Institution
- The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG )
- Web Site: http://library.uncg.edu/
- Advisor
- Lisa Tolbert
Abstract: This thesis examines the process by which Virginian migrants to the frontiers of Georgia fashioned their particular identity as a planter elite in the post-revolutionary South. Study of this migrant community, is a point of access not only to the culture of the southern backcountry, but the difficult question of how elites mediated the upheavals of Virginian society during the latter half of the eighteenth-century. This work is structured around the interrogation of artifacts, particularly houses and furnishings, for the ideas that shaped them. While the material culture of the Chesapeake gentry has been extensively explored, the domestic landscape of the Tidewater's backcountry periphery has received little attention. The interweaving of material and documentary sources makes it possible to access the complicated public identities they authored in response to the challenge posed by the encounter with by Evangelical ideology, and their efforts at maintaining clear cultural boundaries as a migrant community.
"Your Former Selves and Your Present State:" Identity and Domestic Landscape in Upper Georgia, 1780-1815
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Created on 5/1/2008
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Additional Information
- Publication
- Thesis
- Language: English
- Date: 2008
- Keywords
- United States history, Chesapeake gentry, Tidewater
- Subjects
- Plantation owners--Virginia--History
- Architecture and society--United States--History--18th century
- Elite (Social sciences)--United States--History--18th century
- Plantation owners--Georgia--History--18th century