Making the Social Central: An Introduction

In the autumn of 1851, farmer Elizabeth Metcalf participated in a neighborhood quilting party held to help prepare her friends Lizzie and Frank for their upcoming wedding. “We had a very social time,” she wrote in a letter to her mother-in-law, Chloe Metcalf, invoking a consuming dimension of her life and the lives of her contemporaries. In their letters, journals, and family records, antebellum working men and women speak of an intricate web of social exchange and interaction, a social sphere of life that has been largely ignored in studies of New England society. Historians and sociologists debate the roles