Lynnewood Hall, a century-old stunner of a building just outside Philadelphia, silently, almost invisibly, languishes 200 feet beyond a two-lane blacktop road like a crumbling little Versailles. The graceful fountain that welcomed hundreds of well-heeled visitors, President Franklin Roosevelt among [...]
Posts Tagged ‘Society’
June 7th, 2010 - 3:12 pm § in Books
Summer Reads
Kick back this summer and be swept away to another time with the following books: buy from: Amazon | Borders | B & N | Indiebound | Powell’s[...]
The Black Elite in America
Washington D.C. was both the capitol of the United States, but also the black elite. It was in this city, which was built with the labor of thousands of African-Americans, to which the beacon lights of the nation drew like moths to a flame. The “colored elite” of the capitol centered aro[...]
February 16th, 2010 - 1:35 pm § in African American, Etiquette
African-American Etiquette
During the Gilded Age, American publishers met the needs of social climbers aspiring to emulate their betters by producing endless etiquette manuals, so did small presses meet the aspirations of newly wealthy blacks surging into the enclaves formerly preserved for the black elite. These etiquette bo[...]
Hallowe’en In the Gilded Age
Despite its roots in European paganism, Halloween is a thoroughly American holiday. During the Gilded Age, Americans took Halloween quite seriously, even going so far as to celebrate it wherever they happened to be–as German society soon discovered when the expatriates residing in Berlin shook[...]
July 29th, 2009 - 6:00 am § in America, Amusements
American Resorts: Newport
Newport, known as the Queen of Resorts, or as Elizabeth Drexel Lehr stated ironically in her memoirs: “the very Holy and Holies, the playground of the great ones of the earth from which all intruders were ruthlessly excluded,” was transformed each summer for the sole and very conspicuous[...]
The Edwardian Publishing Industry
Much as today, the publishing industry of the Edwardian era wrestled with such familiar issues as distribution, declining interest in reading, literary fiction versus “trash” for the masses, competition for bookstores from cheap editions & used book sales, and the eternal assumption [...]
The Country House Party
The Country House and its society was taken very seriously by the British. Unlike their Continental counterparts, whose society adhered closely to the movements of the court, the British long acknowledged the countryside as the backbone of the country. The Englishman actually preferred to live in th[...]
