Download or read book Cultivating Gentlemen written by Tamara Plakins Thornton and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1989-01-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between the Revolution and the Civil War, many merchants, financiers, manufacturers, lawyers, and politicians of Boston’s elite settles on country estates, took up gentleman farming, and founded agricultural and horticultural societies. It is a curious fact of history that these men, who were directly responsible for changing the Massachusetts economy from a farming to a commercial and industrial one, spent so much time identifying themselves with things rural and agrarian. In this lively and well-illustrated book, Tamara Plakins Thornton documents the rural pursuits and argues that elite Bostonians drew on their rich reservoir of associations to characterize themselves as virtuous members of a legitimate American elite.