Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press);

In cities from Boston to Charleston, elite men and women of eighteenth-century British America came together in private venues to script a polite culture. By examining their various 'texts'--conversations, letters, newspapers, and privately circulated manuscripts--David Shields reconstructs the discourse of civility that flourished in and further shaped elite society in British America.