"Byrne suggests that even though the planter class dominated every aspect of the region, a rising merchant middle class with economic ties outside the South was scattered throughout Dixie...He offers an interesting, well-researched thesis. Recommended."
~Choice
"Becoming Bourgeois adds significantly to our understanding of social class in the Antebellum and Civil War South. Byrne's book reveals a great tension between the role of merchants as economic linchpins in the South and the cultural role they constructed for themselves to ensure their inclusion in southern society."
~Michele Gillespie, Michele Gillespie
"Becoming Bourgeois is a welcome addition to the growing literature on commercial activity and class development in the South, and the presentation makes the book a pleasure to read. Byrne effectively combines his analysis with examples...to help the reader understand antebellum merchant culture and its broader significance."
~North Carolina Historical Review
"Building upon recent work on the middle class and master class, historian Frank Byrne has added yet another dimension to scholarly understanding of the ways in which social structure and culture intertwine.... Byrne has provided us with an insightful analysis of a segment of the Southern population."
~Jonathan Daniel Wells, Johnson & Wales University
"In sum, Byrne has given us a fine book that should further stimulate a recently initiated rethinking of the impact of merchants on nineteenth-century southern society."
~Journal of American History
"Byrne's book is a worthwhile study combining facets of antebellum southern, class, gender, and history into an accessible whole."
~American Historical Review
"In Becoming Bourgeois, Frank Byrne presents a long overdue re-examination of the antebellum merchant in the South. Rich in details gleaned from an impressive assortment of primary and secondary resources, Byrne's portrait of southern merchants is both familiar and novel."
~Register of the Kentucky Historical Society
"Byrne... sympathetically depict[s] the textures of everyday life as experienced by antebellum southern merchants and their families."
~Journal of Southern History
"This excellent study sheds light on a commonly overlooked class of white southerners and provides another example of the ways in which historians continue to highlight the diversity of the 'Old South.'"
~West Virginia History
"Byrne... breathes new life into the slim and aging historiography of merchants in the antebellum South."
~Civil War Book Review
"Frank J. Byrne's study is a welcome exploration of the nation's merchant class, which was crucial to the success of the dominant and more extensively researched planter class... His depiction of the southern merchant class is suggestive and illuminating."
~Journal of East Tennessee History
"Becoming Bourgeois is a valuable addition to a new and growing body of scholarship on the Old South's middle class that has modified the traditional view of Southern free society."
~Louisiana History
"Frank J. Byrne's ground-breaking study of merchants in the antebellum South rests on a question of such good sense one can only marvel why it has not been asked before...A book that shows the complexity of the social structure of the South and of its individuals, particularly one that combines a study of political economy and culture, is a most welcome addition."
~Arkansas Historical Quarterly
