Books in the Early American Places Ser. series

Too often, says Jennifer Goloboy, we equate being middle class with "niceness" - a set of values frozen in the antebellum period and centred on long-term economic and social progress and a close, nurturing family life. Goloboy's case study of merchants in Charleston looks to an earlier time to establish the roots of middle-class culture in America.

Focuses on nineteen counties on the Kansas-Missouri border, tracing slavery's rise and fall from the earliest years of American settlement through the Civil War along this critical geographical, political, and social fault line.