The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American CultureUniversity of Georgia Press, 2007 - 332 pages Our current less-is-more impulse may have contemporary trappings, says David E. Shi, but the underlying ideal has been around for centuries. From Puritans and Quakers to Boy Scouts and hippies, our quest for the simple life is an enduring, complex tradition in American culture. Looking across more than three centuries of want and prosperity, war and peace, Shi introduces a rich cast of practitioners and proponents of the simple life, among them Thomas Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau, Jane Addams, Scott and Helen Nearing, and Jimmy Carter. In the diversity of their aspirations and failings, Shi finds that nothing is simple about our mercurial devotion to the ideal of plain living and high thinking. "Difficult choices are the price of simplicity," he writes in the book's revised epilogue. We may hedge a bit in the practice of simple living, and now and then we are driven by motives no deeper than nostalgia. Shi stresses, however, that the diverse efforts to avoid anxious social striving and compulsive materialism have been essential to the nation's spiritual health. |
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Contents
Introduction | 3 |
TWO The Quaker Ethic | 28 |
THREE Republican Simplicity | 50 |
FOUR Republicanism Transformed | 74 |
SEVEN Patrician Simplicity At Bay | 154 |
EIGHT Progressive Simplicity | 175 |
NINE Prosperity Depression | 215 |
TEN Affluence and Anxiety | 248 |
Other editions - View all
The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture David Emory Shi,David E. Shi No preview available - 1986 |
Common terms and phrases
Agrarians American Arts and Crafts Borsodi Boston Boy Scouts Burroughs Catharine Beecher century Christian civilization classes classical classical republican colonial consumer corruption 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 Lowell luxury material means modern moral movement Muir Nashville Agrarians nature organization outlook patrician Penn piety plain living political practice promote prosperity Puritan Quaker Ralph Borsodi reformers religious republic republican simplicity revival Revolution rich Roosevelt rural Sam Adams Seton simple living social society spiritual spokesmen things Thoreau tion traditional Transcendentalism Transcendentalists urban values virtue vols Voluntary Simplicity wealth William William Penn Winthrop Woodcraft Indians wrote York young youth