| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Ladies and Gentlemen on Display: Planter Society at the Virginia Springs, 1790-1860. By Charlene M. Boyer Lewis. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2002. x, 293 pp. Cloth, $55.00, ISBN 0-8139-2079-5. Paper, $19.50, ISBN 0-8139-2080-9.)

Like many classic works of United States southern history, Charlene M. Boyer Lewis's Ladies and Gentlemen on Display focuses on the elite white planter class in order to bring to life a particular historical time and place. In this case, Boyer Lewis beautifully delineates the antebellum spa culture that thrived in the Blue Ridge and eastern Appalachian mountains, drawing visitors from as far south as Florida and as far west as Texas. But Boyer Lewis eschews nostalgia and complacency, exposing spa settings as places of shifting cultural power, where southern elite identity was both challenged and reinforced, but also where lower-class whites, servants, and slaves exploited the peculiarities of the situation, ironically 'publicly undermining the gentry's illusion of control.' Hierarchy, it seems, did not take a holiday, though it did receive a considerable makeover. . . .

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