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This volume engages a fundamental disciplinary question about this period in American history: how did the bourgeoisie consolidate their power and fashion themselves not simply as economic leaders but as cultural innovators and arbiters? It also explains how culture helped Americans form both a sense of shared identity and a sense of difference.

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PART I Goodbye to the Marketplace: Food and Exclusivity in Nineteenth-Century New York; A.Mendelson ´Natural Distinction´: The American Bourgeois Search for Distinctive Signs in Europe; M.E.Montgomery Henry James and the American Evolution of the Snob; A.Cagidemetrio Patina and Persistence: Miniature Patronage and Production in Antebellum Philadelphia; A.Verplanck The ´Blending and Confusion´ of Expensiveness and Beauty: Bourgeois Interiors; K.Grier PART II Institution-Building and Class Formation: How the Nineteenth-Century Bourgeoisie Organized; S.Beckert The Steady Supporters of Order: American Mechanics´ Institute Fairs as Icons of Bourgeois Culture; E.Robey A Noble Pursuit? The Embourgeoisement of Genealogy, and Genealogy´s Making of the Bourgeoisie; F.Morgan Elite Women and Class Formation; M.Rech Rockwell Rediscovering the Bourgeoisie: Higher Education and Governing Class Formation in the United States, 1870-1914; P.Dobkin Hall PART III Public Sculpture and Bourgeois Self Image; J.Rosenbaum Class Authority and Cultural Entrepreneurship: The Problem of Chicago; P.DiMaggio Bourgeois Appropriation of Music: Challenging Ethnicity, Class, and Gender; M.Broyles The Birth of the American Art Museum; A.Wallach The Manufactured Patron: Staging Bourgeois Identity through Art Consumption in Postbellum America; J.Ott

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JULIA ROSENBAUM is Assistant Professor of Art History at Bard College, USA. SVEN BECKERT is Professor of History at Harvard, USA.

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