Not the US, but if architecture to stay cool is interesting, try Saudi. Here in Riyadh the temp regularly hits 120. (50C) In August in can get a few degrees warmer than that. There is also very little humidity here. The architecture has some interesting adaptations to the temp:
Extremely high ceilings. Even my little apartment has 4 meter ceilings.
Small/narrow windows. Some of the older houses have windows like arrow-slits. Very narrow and set back into the wall.
Thick walls. The exterior walls are around 12" to 14" and even the interior walls are not much thinner.
I don’t think there are any left around here but they used to make wind-towers. Basically a tall chimney that would pull a breeze through the house. The fancier version would put a fountain somewhere so the breeze would be cooled by evaporation.
Probably not. Eventually their bodies were so distorted that they must have stayed in that unnatural shape even without the corset. Corsets were even wore them thoughout the entire pregnancy.
Beck to the original OP, houes were built “bullet style”–all the rooms in a line. When the front and back doors were open, a nice breeze resulted and the heat escaped.
A few years ago on a 96 degree summer day I asked my great-grandfather (born in 1911) how they were able to stand the heat before air conditioning. He replied “Hell, we didn’t know any better”.
Pre-dating the shotgun house in Texas was the dog run house. It was two log rooms with a common roof and an open area (dog run) between the two rooms. The open area was roughly the same size as one of the rooms. During the summer, folks would drag their pallets out to the dog run to sleep. The rooms usually had high ceilings and windows on all sides. There was plenty of cross-ventilation.
My farm house, which has been in the family for about 130 years, was originally a dog run house. Over the years, it was added to and altered so that it the dog run and what used to be the front porch have been enclosed. This totally ruined the ventilation. I’ve seen it still be 95 degrees in there at midnight. I have added fans.
I’ve asked my dad, aunts, and uncles how they slept inside during the summer before they got electricity. They told me they didn’t. They put their matresses on the new front porch and used mosquito netting.
According to Gone With The Wind no decent white woman and few Negroes went outside if she suspected she might be pregnant. But when woman were out in public, undergarments were mandatory. Even if they were just picking cotton.
I wasn’t wondering about pregnant women…I was wondering about any woman at all. I can’t imagine putting on a corset, pantaloons, and petticoats just to lounge around the house, but then, I wasn’t raised that way. Hell, if I’m not going anywhere, you’d be hard pressed to get me out of my pajamas and showered.
Was there no middle class in the ante-bellum South? Were you either dirt poor or plantation rich?