About MARIAL Faculty, Fellows, and Staff Calendar of Events Research and Publications Fellowships Work-Family Resources Virtual Exhibitions	JENNIFER MEARES Department of History Emory University Project title: "Rudeness and Refinement: The Everyday Politics of Respectability in Antebellum Georgia" My project, entitled "Rudeness and Refinement: The Everyday Politics of Respectability in Antebellum Georgia," seeks the historical origins of the southern middle class by examining the spread of bourgeois manners, values, and tastes in Hancock County, Georgia, between the advent of the cotton gin in 1793 and the eve of the Civil War in 1860, with particular emphasis on cleavages or cohesion across social lines of race, socioeconomic status, and gender. Focussing on localized performances of gentility, I analyze how learned attributes like propriety, restraint, and taste became so internalized as to be rendered, by contemporaries, innate components of "character" conferred by blood, birth, and, above all, race. I seek to understand the ways in which refined behavior manifested and maintained social power, as well as ways in which the rude and unruly may have challenged the cultural authority of gentlefolk and devaluated the social currency of gentility itself. Toward this end, my study centers on the performative dimensions of five broad areas of inquiry: material culture and consumption, housing and landscape, leisure and the arts, manners and appearance, and education. Here, the attributes of gentility and rudeness were defined and made manifest. My primary focus is on sites of ritualized cultural display, whether they be public spaces (like muster fields, courthouse stairs, church pews, country stores, and campaign trails) or stages for less dramatic modes of display (parlors and porches, letters, and portraits). Such sites were simultaneously theaters for performing gentility, means of translating the choreography of cultured conduct into social power and authority, and central arenas for contesting the link between the two.