Bowing to Necessities: A History of Manners in America, 1620-1860

Along with John F. Kasson's *Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America*, I found this book accessible, informative, sophisticated, and well written. These are the qualities that I look for in reading a book. While we tend to focus on the more obvious, the two books tell us a lot about the not-so-obvious in modern living. Reading etiquette and conduct books after having read these books proved a lot of fun and thoroughly enlightening.