In urban areas from Boston to Charleston, the elite men and women of eighteenth-century British America came together in a variety of private venues to communicate and interact. David Shields looks into the taverns, tea rooms, salons, coffee houses, card parties, clubs, and fraternities where these displays of civility took place.

He argues that such spaces, formed outside the domain of the state, became key sites for elite discursive formation, for the articulation and enactment of the values of civility.

In an important reinterpretation of early American literary history, he argues that the belles lettres generated for and within these institutions in fact represent a powerful colonial genre involving experimentation with manners and social identities.

By examining the language and forms of various "texts" - including conversations, letters, privately circulated manuscripts, and other forms of expression - he reconstructs the discourse of civility that flourished in and further shaped elite society in British America.