A collection of Carson's typescript, galley proofs, and page proofs of The polite Americans, all with autograph corrections.

Americans have traveled a far piece since Goody Randall climbed over the back of a Bay Colony pew in defense of her social position, or a frontier Congressman tried to eat the doilies at a White House dinner, or, more recently, since the adjustable Emily Post interpreted the social law on whether a lady’s maid could appear in bobbed hair. (She could not!) With unfailing scholarship, great good humor and occasional overtones of irony when snobbery raises its ugly nose, Gerald Carson here portrays the journey of American manners through shifting tastes and customs in regards to weddings, dances, hair styles, drinking, dueling, dress, smoking, the telephone, the automobile, the rise of the country club and the history of the fraternal lodge, among hundreds of topics. There is much of special interest to citizens of Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York and many other cities. There is a full chapter on manners in the nation’s capital as well as one on books of etiquette. The author’s emphasis is upon the middle class, the mainstream of America’s national life, rather than Society with the capital S. This field has been plowed a good many times, while Mr. Carson’s area is almost untouched. His central theme is the reaching out of the American man and woman for self-improvement and a life of some grace. Citizens of the United States are still free to become, as the late Professor Arthur M. Schlesinger pointed out, as unequal as they can.

In cities from Boston to Charleston, elite men and women of eighteenth-century British America came together in private venues to script a polite culture. By examining their various 'texts'--conversations, letters, newspapers, and privately circulated manuscripts--David Shields reconstructs the discourse of civility that flourished in and further shaped elite society in British America.

As a preteen Black male growing up in Mount Vernon, New York, there were a series of moments, incidents and wounds that caused me to retreat inward in despair and escape into a world of imagination. For five years I protected my family secrets from authority figures, affluent Whites and middle class Blacks while attending an unforgiving gifted-track magnet school program that itself was embroiled in suburban drama. It was my imagination that shielded me from the slights of others, that enabled my survival and academic success. It took everything I had to get myself into college and out to Pittsburgh, but more was in store before I could finally begin to break from my past. "Boy @ The Window" is a coming-of-age story about the universal search for understanding on how any one of us becomes the person they are despite-or because of-the odds. It's a memoir intertwined with my own search for redemption, trust, love, success-for a life worth living. "Boy @ The Window" is about one of the most important lessons of all: what it takes to overcome inhumanity in order to become whole and human again.