The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American CultureUniversity of Georgia Press, 2001 - 332 pages Looking across three centuries of want and prosperity, war and peace, this work introduces a cast of practitioners and proponents of the simple life, among them Thomas Jefferson, Scott and Helen Nearing, Jimmy Carter and Jane Addams. It finds that nothing is simple about our mercurial devotion to the ideal of plain living and high thinking. Though we may hedge a bit in practice and are now and then driven by motives no deeper than nostalgia, this work stresses that the diverse efforts to avoid anxious social striving and compulsive materialism have been essential to the nation's spiritual health. |
Contents
Introduction | 3 |
The Puritan Way | 8 |
The Quaker Ethic | 28 |
Republican Simplicity | 50 |
Republicanism Transformed | 74 |
Simplicity Domesticated | 100 |
Transcendental Simplicity | 125 |
Patrician Simplicity At Bay | 154 |
Common terms and phrases
agrarian American Arts and Crafts Borsodi Boston Boy Scouts Burroughs Catharine Beecher century Christian civilization classes classical classical republican colonial consumer corrupt culture domestic early economic Edward Edward Bok Emerson England ethic extravagance factory farm father Friends frugality Gilded Age Godkin Henry hereafter cited History homestead human Ibid ideal individual industrial intellectual James Jefferson Jeffersonian John Adams John Winthrop John Woolman Journal labor Letters luxury material means modern moral movement Muir Nashville Agrarians nature organization outlook patrician Penn piety plain living political practice progressive promote prosperity Puritan Quaker Ralph Borsodi reformers religious republic republican simplicity revival Revolution rich Roosevelt rural Sam Adams Seton simple living simpler social society spiritual spokesmen Thoreau tion traditional Transcendentalism Transcendentalists urban values virtue vols Voluntary Simplicity wealth William William Penn Winthrop Woodcraft Indians wrote York young youth