A full-color catalog and in-depth examination of the distinctive furniture made by pro-British carpenter and joiner John Shearer, one of the most accomplished furniture makers of the post-Revolutionary period. This publication is co-sponsored by the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts at Old Salem, the Daughters of the American Revolution Museum, and the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley.
While demonstrating the high level of artistry attained by furniture-makers of the period, this selection in many ways reflects the evolving character of domestic life in America during a seminal period in the country's history.
This book explores changes in rural households of the Georgia Piedmont through the material culture of farmers as they transitioned from self-sufficiency to market dependence. The period between 1880 and 1910 was a time of dynamic change when Southern farmers struggled to reinvent their lives and livelihoods. Relying on primary documents, including probate inventories, tax lists, state and federal census data, and estate sale results, this study seeks to understand the variables that prompted farm households to assume greater risk in hopes of success as well as those factors that stood in the way of progress. While there are few projects of this type for the late nineteenth century, and fewer still for the New South, the findings challenge the notion of farmers as overly conservative consumers and call into question traditional views of conspicuous consumption as a key indicator of wealth and status.
This book was prepared in conjunction with the exhibit Virginia Samplers: Young Ladies and Their Needle Wisdom, 10/31/1997-09/08/1998, at the DeWitt Wallace Gallery, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Williamsburg, VA.
Cowinner, 2008 Fred Kniffen Book Award. Pioneer America Society/Association for the Preservation of Landscapes and Artifacts How did people living on the early American frontier discover and then become a part of the market economy? How do their purchases and their choices revise our understanding of the market revolution and the emerging consumer ethos? Ann Smart Martin provides answers to these questions by examining the texture of trade on the edge of the upper Shenandoah Valley between 1760 and 1810. Reconstructing the world of one country merchant, John Hook, Martin reveals how the acquisition of consumer goods created and validated a set of ideas about taste, fashion, and lifestyle in a particular place at a particular time. Her analysis of Hook's account ledger illuminates the everyday wants, transactions, and tensions recorded within and brings some of Hook's customers to life: a planter looking for just the right clock, a farmer in search of nails, a young woman and her friends out shopping on their own, and a slave woman choosing a looking glass. This innovative approach melds fascinating narratives with sophisticated analysis of material culture to distill large abstract social and economic systems into intimate triangulations among merchants, customers, and objects. Martin finds that objects not only reflect culture, they are the means to create it.
Winterthur Museum is world renowned for its decorative arts collections and its exceptional educational programs. Adapted from the training materials developed at the museum, the revised and enhanced Early American Decorative Arts, 1620-1860: A Handbook for Interpreters is an indispensable guide for anyone involved with interpretation of decorative arts collections. Early American Decorative Arts, 1620-1860 elucidates the principles of public interpretation, explains how to analyze objects, and defines the concept of style. Eighteen chapters provide comprehensive descriptions of decorative arts including furniture, ceramics, textiles, paintings and prints, metalwork, glass, and other objects. Many museums and historic sites display such collections to thousands of visitors annually. Guides, interpreters, educators, and collection managers will find this book a helpful summary and a guide to further research. This enhanced edition includes now includes a CD featuring beautiful color images of the more than 170 black-and-white photographs in the book, bringing the Winterthur collections to life on your computer and in your classroom. Published in cooperation with Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library.
Antique clothing worn by men, women, and children in the eighteenth century offers a revealing glimpse into the lives of colonial Virginians. Accessories such as aprons, gloves, hats, handkerchiefs, fans, shoes, stockings, and undergarments are also illustrated.
In The Mirror of Antiquity, Caroline Winterer uncovers the lost world of American women's classicism during its glory days from the eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Overturning the widely held belief that classical learning and political ideals were relevant only to men, she follows the lives of four generations of American women through their diaries, letters, books, needlework, and drawings, demonstrating how classicism was at the center of their experience as mothers, daughters, and wives. Importantly, she pays equal attention to women from the North and from the South, and to the ways that classicism shaped the lives of black women in slavery and freedom.In a strikingly innovative use of both texts and material culture, Winterer exposes the neoclassical world of furnishings, art, and fashion created in part through networks dominated by elite women. Many of these women were at the center of the national experience. Here readers will find Abigail Adams, teaching her children Latin and signing her letters as Portia, the wife of the Roman senator Brutus; the Massachusetts slave Phillis Wheatley, writing poems in imitation of her favorite books, Alexander Pope's Iliad and Odyssey; Dolley Madison, giving advice on Greek taste and style to the U.S. Capitol's architect, Benjamin Latrobe; and the abolitionist and feminist Lydia Maria Child, who showed Americans that modern slavery had its roots in the slave societies of Greece and Rome. Thoroughly embedded in the major ideas and events of the time—the American Revolution, slavery and abolitionism, the rise of a consumer society—this original book is a major contribution to American cultural and intellectual history.
