Whitewashing America: Material Culture and Race in the Antebellum ImaginationPaperback, 1 October 2003

Even before mass marketing, American consumers bought products that gentrified their households and broadcast their sense of "the good things in life."

Bridging literary scholarship, archeology, history, and art history, Whitewashing America: Material Culture and Race in the Antebellum Imagination explores how material goods shaped antebellum notions of race, class, gender, and purity.

From the Revolutionary Way until the Civil War, American consumers increasingly sought white-colored goods. Whites preferred mass-produced and specialized products, avoiding the former dark, course, low-quality products issued to slaves. White consumers surrounded themselves with refined domestic items, visual reminders of who they were, equating wealth, discipline, and purity with the racially "white."

Clothing, paint, dinnerware, gravestones and buildings staked a visual contrast, a portable, visible title and deed segregating upper-class whites from their lower-class neighbors and househo