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Colonial Williamsburg Teacher Gazette
December 1, 2006Volume 5, Issue 4
Primary Source of the Month

"High Life Below Stairs," by John Collet, London, England, 1763.
High Life Below Stairs, by John Collet, London, England, 1763. From the collections of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

CONTENTS
"The Consumer Revolution "
Primary Source of the Month

Teaching Strategy

Colonial Williamsburg Teaching Resources

Teaching News

Quotation of the Month


The next
Electronic Field Trip is
Buying Respectability EFT
Buying Respectability
December 14, 2006



2006-2007 Teaching
Resources Catalog
2006-2007 Teaching Resources Catalog



PSCU Financial Services Logo

2006–2007 Electronic Field
Trip Scholarships


Kids Zone: History, Games & Fun
Games, activities, and resources about life in colonial America

 TOP STORIES
The Consumer Revolution

The differences between the ways people lived during the Middle Ages and those in the period just before the American Revolution are almost unimaginable to modern, comfort-loving Americans. What caused this dramatic change in lifestyles and standards of living? Many factors combined to make new consumer goods available to nearly everyone in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Incomes were rising, so more people had more money left over after they acquired the bare necessities.

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Primary Source of the Month:
High Life Below Stairs, by John Collet

John Collet’s High Life Below Stairs satirizes the behavior of servants in their own quarters (below stairs) imitating the fashionable attire and behavior of their masters. Even though the primary purpose of the painting is to mock those who aspire to genteel behavior and appearances, the print provides visual documentation of the ways the eighteenth-century consumer revolution made material goods available to people lower on the social and economic scale.

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Teaching Strategy: Buying Respectability

In a Quicktime presentation, students will view several eighteenth-century objects and determine to which class of colonial society (gentry, middling sort, or lower sort) each object belongs. Then, students will identify and place a variety of twenty-first-century objects into three categories: "most expensive," "middle of the road," and "least expensive."

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Colonial Williamsburg Teaching Resources for Your Classroom

Colonial Williamsburg offers a variety of quality instructional materials dealing with 18th-century life, including:

  • Buying Respectability: The Consumer Revolution in 18th-Century Virginia (lesson unit)
  • Eighteenth-Century Clothing at Williamsburg (book)
  • A Williamsburg Household (book)
  • Virginians at Home (book)

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Teaching News

Are you too busy to dig around for the latest education news articles? The Education World "Ed Scoops" page tracks down education news from across the nation and around the world.

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Quotation of the Month

"The civility which money will purchase is rarely extended to those who have none."

—Charles Dickens, British novelist
Sketches by Boz, 1836
For more information about Colonial Williamsburg teaching resources, visit our Internet site at: http://www.history.org/teach

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