Traders and Gentlefolk

Kierner vividly recreates the history of four generations of Livingstons and sheds new light on the development of both the elite ideology they represented and of the wider culture of early America.

Cynthia A. Kierner is Professor of History at George Mason University. She is the author of Beyond the Household: Women's Place in the Early South, 1700–1835, also from Cornell; Scandal at Bizarre: Rumor and Reputation in Jefferson's America; Revolutionary America; and Southern Women in Revolution, 1776–1800: Personal and Political Narratives.

In this gracefully written account of four generations of the Livingston family, Kierner... documents the metamorphosis of a rich family into a genteel one.

Cynthia A. Kierner has produced a marvelous study of New York's Livingston family that shows them both as individuals and as representatives of an Anglo-American gentry that emerged, stabilized, and retreated between the arrival in New York of the first Robert Livingston, in 1675, and the death of his great-grandson, Robert R. Livingston, in 1790.... Traders and Gentlefolk is biography the way it should be—informative, illustrative, and entertaining.