Examining the American planters' aspirations from the perspective of cultural theory and in the comparative context of a larger British world, Rozbicki asserts that for this emerging elite, the genteel quest was the only feasible route to identity and authority: it became a central dynamic of their lives, crucial to their ambitious struggles with provincialism and the metropolitan condescension toward colonial "upstarts." The author also shows how this determined quest played a vital but little-understood role in the construction of a new American identity, as the European model enabled the colonial elite to achieve sufficient maturity, confidence, and pride in their virtues and rights to defy the British in the 1770s. Originally asserting the gentlemanly ideals of liberty and equality against the British crown, Revolutionary gentry inadvertently cultivated them in the fertile ground of nonelite culture.

This is the remarkable story of the trail that became the longest street in the world, as officially recognized by The Guinness Book of Records. Begun in 1794, Yonge Street was planned by the ambitious Lieutenant Governor John Graves Simcoe as a military route between Lake Ontario and Lake Huron. Anxious to bolster Upper Canada's defences against the new republic to the south, which he heartily loathed, Simcoe had his Queen's Rangers survey and develop the route from Toronto to present-day Holland Landing, and laid out lots for settlement. Even the trusty Rangers, as one surveyor complained in 1799, needed little excuse to lay down tools and vanish "to carouse upon St. George's day." Handsomely illustrated with the author's drawings, and painstakingly researched, this book captures the not-so-distant days when muddy Yonge Street was the backbone of pioneer Ontario.

This is the remarkable story of the trail that became the longest street in the world, as officially recognized by The Guinness Book of Records. Begun in 1794, Yonge Street was planned by the ambitious Lieutenant Governor John Graves Simcoe as a military route between Lake Ontario and Lake Huron. Anxious to bolster Upper Canada's defences against the new republic to the south, which he heartily loathed, Simcoe had his Queen's Rangers survey and develop the route from Toronto to present-day Holland Landing, and laid out lots for settlement. Even the trusty Rangers, as one surveyor complained in 1799, needed little excuse to lay down tools and vanish "to carouse upon St. George's day." Handsomely illustrated with the author's drawings, and painstakingly researched, this book captures the not-so-distant days when muddy Yonge Street was the backbone of pioneer Ontario.