• Introduction
• The first era, 1790 to
• 1835: the restaurant, the coffeehouse, and the oyster cellar
• The second era, 1835 to
• 1865: the great hotel, the saloon, and the black caterer
• The third era, 1865 to
• 1885: the French hegemony and the nationalist reaction
• The gilded age, 1885 to
• 1919: fame and the master chef.

He presided over Virginia's great political barbeques for the last half of the nineteenth century, taught the young Prince of Wales to crave mint juleps in 1859, catered to Virginia's mountain spas, and fed two generations of Richmond epicures with terrapin and turkey. This fascinating culinarian is John Dabney (1821-1900), who was born a slave, but later built an enterprising catering business. Dabney is just one of 175 influential cooks and restaurateurs profiled by David S. Shields in The Culinarians, a beautifully produced encyclopedic history of the rise of professional cooking in America from the early republic to Prohibition. Shields's concise biographies include the legendary Julien, founder in 1793 of America's first restaurant, Boston's Restorator; and Louis Diat and Oscar of the Waldorf, the men most responsible for keeping the ideal of fine dining alive between the World Wars. Though many of the gastronomic pioneers gathered here are less well known, their diverse influence on American dining should not be overlooked plus, their stories are truly entertaining. We meet an African American oyster dealer who became the Congressional caterer, and, thus, a powerful broker of political patronage; a French chef who was a culinary savant of vegetables and drove the rise of California cuisine in the 1870s; and a rotund Philadelphia confectioner who prevailed in a culinary contest with a rival in New York by staging what many believed to be the greatest American meal of the nineteenth century. He later grew wealthy selling ice cream to the masses. Shields also introduces us to a French chef who brought haute cuisine to wealthy prospectors and a black restaurateur who hosted a reconciliation dinner for black and white citizens at the close of the Civil War in Charleston. Altogether, Culinarians is a delightful compendium of charcuterie-makers, pastry-pipers, caterers, railroad chefs, and cooking school matrons not to mention drunks, temperance converts, and gangsters who all had a hand in creating the first age of American fine dining and its legacy of conviviality and innovation that continues today.
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• Rebooting a cuisine
• The South and the institutions of American food
• Madame Eugène and nineteenth-century restaurant cuisine in New Orleans
• The Maryland Club feast
• Charleston's caterers, 1795 to 1883
• The Jockey Club banquet of February 1, 1860
• Possum in Wetumpka
• Touring the city markets, 1810 to 1860
• Fish master : C.C. Leslie and the reconstruction of Charleston cuisine
• The New York market : national supply and demand
• Truck farming
• Carolina gold rice
• Sugar from the sugarcane
• Sorghum
• Prospecting for oil
• Peanuts and peanut oil
• Citrus
• The return of the tastes.

Southern food is America's quintessential cuisine. From creamy grits to simmering pots of beans and greens, we think we know how these classic foods should taste. Yet the southern food we eat today tastes almost nothing like the dishes our ancestors enjoyed because the varied crops and livestock that originally defined this cuisine have largely disappeared. Now, a growing movement of chefs and farmers is seeking to change that by recovering the flavor and diversity of southern food. At the center of that movement is historian David S. Shields. In Southern Provisions, he reveals how the true ingredients of southern cooking have been all but forgotten and how the lessons of its current restoration and recultivation can be applied to other regional foodways. Shields' turf is the southern Lowcountry, from the peanut patches of Wilmington, North Carolina, to the sugarcane fields of the Georgia Sea Islands and the citrus groves of Amelia Island, Florida, and he takes us on an excursion to this region in order to offer a vivid history of southern foodways. Shields begins by looking at how professional chefs during the nineteenth century set standards of taste that elevated southern cooking to the level of cuisine. He then turns to the role of food markets in creating demand for ingredients and enabling conversation between producers and preparers. Next, his focus shifts to the field, showing how the key ingredients-rice, sugarcane, sorghum, benne, cottonseed, peanuts, and citrus - emerged and went on to play a significant role in commerce and consumption. Shields concludes with a look at the challenges of reclaiming both farming and cooking traditions. From Carolina gold rice to white flint corn, the ingredients of authentic southern cooking are returning to fields and dinner plates, and with Shields as our guide, we can satisfy our hunger both for the most flavorful regional dishes and their history.
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Seeking to recover the disappeared world of "belle lettres", this book examines the various "texts" of 18th-century British America - conversations, letters, newpapers, and privately circulated manuscripts. It reconstructs the discourse of civility that shaped the elite society of the time.
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• pt.
• 1. Materializing regional identity. St. Augustine : the first century, 1565-1665 / Paul E. Hoffman
• Building for disaster : hurricanes and the built environments in South Carolina and the British West Indies / Matthew Mulcahy
• Christ Church, Savannah : loopholes in metropolitan design on the frontier / Carl R. Lounsbury
• "The diversity of countries" : Anglican churches in Virginia, South Carolina, and Jamaica / Louis P. Nelson
• Colonial castles : the architecture of social control / Eric Klingelhofer
• Rituals of rulership : the material culture of West Indian politics / Natalie Zacek
• L'Hermitage on the Monocacy Battlefield, Frederick, Maryland / Paula Stoner Reed
• A dissenting space : meetinghouse and location in early Dorchester, South Carolina / Jeffrey H. Richards
• Charlestown to Charleston : urban and plantation connections in an Atlantic setting / Roger H. Leech
• pt.
• 2. Locating urbanity. A poetics of urban space / Bernard L. Herman
• Building Charleston : the expansion of an eighteenth-century British Atlantic town / Emma Hart
• Domestic material culture and consumer demand in the British Atlantic world : colonial South Carolina, 1670-1770 / R.C. Nash
• The archaeological signature of eighteenth-century Charleston / Martha A. Zierden
• Changing our habitation : Henry Laurens, Rattray Green, and the revolutionary movement in Charleston's domestic spaces / Benjamin L. Carp
• Raphaelle Peale's Still life with oranges : status, ritual, and the illusion of mastery / Maurie D. McInnis
• Urban plantations in the national city : slavery, republican ideology, and conflict on the streets of early Washington / Laura Croghan Kamoie.

This book offers a heavily illustrated comparative study of artifacts and architecture from three historically linked regions. "Material Culture in Anglo-America" examines the extent to which regions project cultural identities through the material forms of objects, buildings, and constructed environments. This volume explores the material constitution of the West Indies, Carolina lowcountry, and Chesapeake Tidewater - three historically related regions that shared strong likenesses in culture, commerce, and political development in the colonial through antebellum eras, yet also cultivated the distinctive regional flair with which they are now associated. The contributors - an impressive and international array of historical archeologists, art historians, literary historians, museum curators, social historians, geographers, and historians of material culture - combine theoretical reflections on the poetics of representative material culture with empirical studies of how things were made and put to use in specific locales. They argue that the material culture of urban and rural settings interpenetrated each other and discuss the complications of class, race, religion, and settler culture within developing regions to reveal how all of these factors influenced the richness of crafted artifacts. The study is further grounded in several striking case studies that dramatically demonstrate how constructed things can embody communal self-understanding while still participating in an overarching transatlantic cultural community.
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This title presents foundational texts in American wine making. This volume collects the most important writings on viticulture by Nicholas Herbemont (1771-1839), who is widely considered the finest practicing winemaker of the early United States. Included are his two major treatises on viticulture, thirty-one other published pieces on vine growing and wine making, and essays that outline his agrarian philosophy. Over the course of his career, Herbemont cultivated more than three hundred varieties of grapes in a garden the size of a city block in Columbia, South Carolina, and in a vineyard at his plantation, Palmyra, just outside the city.Born in France, Herbemont carefully tested the most widely held methods of growing, pruning, processing, and fermentation in use in Europe to see which proved effective in the southern environment. His treatise "Wine Making, " first published in the American Farmer in 1833, became for a generation the most widely read and reliable American guide to the art of producing potable vintage.David S. Shields, in his introductory essay, positions Herbemont not only as important to the history of viticulture in America but also as a notable proponent of agricultural reform in the South. Herbemont advocated such practices as crop rotation and soil replenishment and was an outspoken critic of slave-based cotton culture.
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• George Sandys
• Thomas Morton
• John Smith
• John Wilson
• William Bradford
• Christopher Gardiner
• Edward Johnson
• from the Bay Psalm book
• Roger Williams
• John Fiske
• Anne Bradstreet
• John Saffin
• Edmund Hickeringill
• Michael Wigglesworth
• Urian Oakes
• George Alsop
• Benjamin Tompson
• James Revel
• Edward Taylor
• Francis Daniel Pastorius
• John Norton Jr.
• Samuel Sewall
• Benjamin Harris
• John Danforth
• Cotton Mather
• Sarah Kemble Knight
• Robert Hunter
• Ebenezer Cook
• Lewis Morris II
• Benjamin Colman
• Tom Law
• Christopher Witt
• Henry Brooke
• Roger Wolcott
• Charles Hansford
• George Berkeley
• George Seagood
• Joseph Breintnall
• James Kirkpatrick
• Susanna Wright
• Richard Lewis
• Thomas Dale
• "Ralpho Cobble"
• James Sterling
• William Dawson
• John Adams
• Archibald Home
• Joseph Green
• Benjamin Franklin
• Mather Byles
• Jane Colman Turrell
• Mary Hirst Pepperell
• John Seccomb
• Anon.
• "Poor Julian"
• Jupiter Hammon
• John Osborn
• Thomas Cradock
• Charles Woodmason
• James Grainger
• Samuel Davies
• A.L.M.
• Thomas Clemson
• "Carolina, a young lady"
• Joseph Dumbleton
• William Livingston
• Samson Occom
• Anon.
• Anon.
• William Smith
• Hannah Griffitts
• Mary Nelson
• Mercy Otis Warren
• Lucy Terry
• Ned Botwood
• Henry Timberlake
• Benjamin Banneker
• Thomas Godfrey Jr.
• Annis Boudinot Stockton
• John Singleton
• Francis Hopkinson
• Jonathan Odell
• Thomas Paine
• Yankee Doodle
• Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson
• Robert Bolling
• Nathaniel Evans
• Joseph Stansbury
• William Billings
• John Andreþ
• John Trumbull
• Ann Eliza Bleecker
• Timothy Dwight
• Anon.
• Anne Hecht
• Philip Freneau
• David Humphreys
• St. George Tucker
• George Ogilvie
• Phillis Wheatley
• Lemuel Haynes
• Joel Barlow
• Royall Tyler
• Margaret Lowther Page
• Sarah Wentworth Morton
• Joseph Hopkinson
• Thomas Green Fessenden
• Charles Brockden Brown
• Robert Treat Paine Jr.
• William Munford.

The stories now being told about the colonial American past represent an "America" newly found, as scholars continue to evaluate and revise the longer-standing stories that have, across the centuries, held particular cultural and critical sway. This collection is a celebration of the widening of scholarly inquire in early American studies, and a tribute to a leading early Americanist whose scholarly career continues to contribute to the opening up of crucial questions of canon.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)