On April 17 (7pm, Church of the Holy Cross, 299 Seven Farms Drive) Dr. Amanda Mushal will present “A Handsome Assortment of the Newest Fashions: The Businesswomen of Antebellum King Street”.

In the years before the Civil War, King Street emerged as Charleston’s main shopping district. Women especially visited its shops to peruse the latest styles in everything from laces and bonnets to wall hangings, furniture, and such new inventions as sewing machines and early iceboxes. Women also numbered among King Street’s entrepreneurs, offering fashionable bonnets and dress trimmings, china and glassware, dry goods and confectionary to Charleston shoppers. This talk will discuss these businesswomen, examining where they purchased their stock, how they advertised their wares, how they responded to a changing business environment, and ways in which they themselves participated in the nation’s emerging consumer culture.

Amanda Mushal is an associate professor of history at the Citadel in Charleston, S.C. She earned her B.A. from the College of William and Mary and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. Her work focuses on antebellum southern commercial culture.   Dr. Mushal is a contributor to The Field of Honor: Essays on Southern Character and American Identity and The Southern Middle Class in the Long Nineteenth Century.  Her current project examines the early development of R.G. Dun & Company, a commercial credit reporting firm whose surviving records document the mid-nineteenth-century activities of businesses throughout the United States.