Constructing Townscapes: Space and Society in Antebellum Tennessee

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Description

The antebellum South has been drawn in large part as a map of contrasting extremes–a vast agrarian landscape punctuated by a couple of major cities. Small towns have either been viewed as sleepy villages that reflected the countryside or dismissed as urban microcosms. In Constructing Townscapes, on the other hand, the small town emerges from obscurity to reveal its distinctive and influential role in the southern landscape.
Using existing architectural evidence in addition to photographs, maps, diaries, letters, and newspapers, Lisa Tolbert shows how residents of four county seats in antebellum Middle Tennessee rebuilt and reorganized their towns in keeping with changing social and economic circumstances. She also illuminates the ways in which three seemingly powerless groups–women, young men, and slaves–influenced the arrangement of town space, vividly retracing the footsteps of members of these groups as they traveled town streets to perform their day-to-day routines.
Through careful analysis of the relationships between the material and social contexts of town life, Tolbert shows that small towns, whose stories have regularly been regarded as incidental to the course of southern history, will have to in fact be understood as important components of antebellum southern culture.

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