"On April 17, 1865, eighteen year old John Rakestraw left the family farm in Bart Township, Lancaster County, to attend Unionville Academy, a small Quaker boarding school in Chester County. During the time he was away his two older sisters wrote to him regularly. Ten of those letters have survived and they provide a candid and often painfully honest glimpse of life on a Lancaster County farm in the 1860's. Diaries and ledgers kept by John's father, William I. Rakestraw , provide additional insight into that that time and place." [excerpt from the text]
"By following the story of my great-grandmother Isabella Ford's life, and adding to it with information from available sources, I have been able to get a better understanding of the circumstances of Lancaster's free blacks. Her story provides a sense of life in mid-nineteenth century Lancaster County and shows how free black families held their own, despite an environment that was often unfriendly and that restricted their opportunities by both law and custom."
xv, 400 p., [8] p. of plates : ill. (some col.) ; 27 cm.
Series
Early American studies
Notes
Includes bibliographical references (p. [335]-377) and index.
Contents
Painters and patrons -- The village enlightenment -- Cosmopolitan communities -- Itinerants and inventors -- A tale of two chairmaking towns -- Provincial portraits -- Daguerreotypes : the industrial image.
Summary
In the middle of the nineteenth century, middle-class Americans embraced a new culture of domestic consumption, one that centered on chairs and clocks as well as family portraits and books. How did that new world of goods, represented by Victorian parlors filled with overstuffed furniture and daguerreotype portraits, come into being? This work highlights the significant role of provincial artisans in four crafts in the northeastern United States, chairmaking, clockmaking, portrait painting, and book publishing, to explain the shift from preindustrial society to an entirely new configuration of work, commodities, and culture. As a whole, the book proposes an innovative analysis of early nineteenth century industrialization and the development of a middle class consumer culture. It relies on many of the objects beloved by decorative arts scholars and collectors to evoke the vitality of village craft production and culture in the decades after the War of Independence. It grounds its broad narrative of cultural change in case studies of artisans, consumers, and specific artifacts. Each chapter opens with an "object lesson" and weaves an object-based analysis together with the richness of individual lives. The path that such craftspeople and consumers took was not inevitable; on the contrary, as the author, a historian demonstrates, it was strewn with alternative outcomes, such as decentralized production with specialized makers. The book offers a collective biography of the post-Revolutionary generation, gathering together the case studies of producers and consumers who embraced these changes, those who opposed them, or, most significantly, those who fashioned the myriad small changes that coalesced into a new Victorian cultural order that none of them had envisioned or entirely appreciated.
Something in that Declaration -- The Republican revolution: Pennsylvania picks Lincoln -- Mobilizing for war -- We will die in defense of our right to liberty: the Civil War on Pennsylvania's border -- Combating the threat without and within -- Pennsylvania and the second American Revolution -- A day long to be remembered.
Summary
This book takes you to and beyond the battlefield at Gettysburg, to cities and towns throughout the state where Pennsylvanians fought over the meaning of the Union even as they fought for it. By the time the Civil War began in 1861, white and black Pennsylvanians along the state's southern border-in towns like Sadsbury, Coatesville, and Christiana-had been fighting with slave owners and catchers for a decade. And, more than a year after Lee's Army of Northern Virginia left southcentral Pennsylvania, the town of Chambersburg survived another, even more devastating Confederate invasion. For much longer than four years, Pennsylvanians waged war at home and abroad, to save the Union and to rethink its founding principles. Keystone State in Crisis tells that story. [from the publisher]
