Provincial Lives tells the story of the development of a regional middle class in the antebellum Middle West. It traces the efforts of waves of Americans to transmit their social structures, behavior, and values to the West and construct a distinctive regional middle-class culture on the urban frontier. Intertwining local, regional, and national history with social, immigration, gender and urban history, Mahoney examines how a succession of settlers from "good" society-farmers, entrepreneurs, professionals, and "genteel" men and women from the urban East-interacted with, accommodated, and compromised with those already there to construct a middle-class society. | Provincial Lives by Timothy R. Mahoney, Paperback | Indigo Chapters