Her image appeared in periodicals and advertisements roughly twenty times daily; she rivaled FDR and Edward VIII as the most photographed person in the world. Her portrait brightened the homes of countless admirers: from a black laborer's cabin in South Carolina to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's recreation room in Washington, DC. A few years later her smile cheered the secret bedchamber of Anne Frank in Amsterdam. For four consecutive years Shirley...

John F. Kasson writes of the deep tensions created by the demands of democracy, the pressures of an expanding market economy, and the desire for social distinction. He re-creates the deferential and often coarse society of colonial years, then its transformation as aspirations and social forms earlier restricted to the gentry became popularized. The rapidly industrializing economy most intensively affected the booming cities. Etiquette advisers sought...