Davis (1803–1892), Downing recommended the building of country homes where one could cleanse the soul by escaping the psychologically and physically unhealthy aspects of urban life. In his many popular publications, including The Architecture of Country Houses (1850) and Horticulturalist Magazine, often illustrated by architect Alexander J. American architect and landscape designer Andrew Jackson Downing (1815–1852) proclaimed the home a “powerful means of civilization” and a remedy for social evils. This public/private divide was echoed in an idealization of nature and the rural against the noisome, polluted city and its expanding immigrant population. ![]() Middle-class women would (and were expected to) retire from the workforce to their proper sphere and attend to their primary duties-child rearing and homemaking ( 28.148.1). The domestic sphere, the realm of home and family, no longer a site of production as in the eighteenth century, would now be seen as a haven against the impersonal, competitive forces of capitalism ( 66.242.27). The rapid shift from an agrarian to industrial economy and the growth of the business sector, with their attendant social and economic dislocations, spurred the development of a powerful ideology in which private and public spheres were considered antithetical. New forms of manufacture emerged: arms manufacturers and Connecticut clockmakers turned to standardized parts to speed production. The availability of factory-produced goods such as parlor suites of furniture made the trappings of success affordable to the middle class. City merchants built stores opulent enough to be dubbed “palaces of consumption.” Urban elites competed in a rivalry over the status of their cities, commissioning public sculptures of the nation’s leaders and heroes, therefore providing opportunities for sculptors ( 97.13.1). Morse in 1844), and then the railroad, knit together the regions the transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869. Fleeing the potato famine in Ireland and revolutionary turmoil in the German states, foreign-born workers increasingly replaced native-born labor, toiling in factories and crowding into the working-class sections of expanding cities. The nation’s population nearly quadrupled between 18, to over 31 million, swelled by an influx of immigrants. ![]() Women in particular became prodigious readers, as well as the authors of many books and magazine articles ( 17.104). ![]() By 1850, nine out of every ten adult white Americans could read, and millions bought books. Affordable books and color prints from the new printing presses disseminated new fashions and ideas connecting urban and rural, East and West. Stationary steam engines powering advanced machinery allowed factories to set up in the nation’s largest cities ( 1999.396). By 1860, the United States was second only to Great Britain and France in manufacturing. Northern manufacturing extended the use of power-driven machines to a wider range of commodities in the middle decades of the century.
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