Includes bibliographical references (p. [419]-478) and index.
Summary
"They began their existence as everyday objects, but in the hands of award-winning historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, fourteen domestic items from preindustrial America-ranging from a linen tablecloth to an unfinished sock-relinquish their stories and offer profound insights into our history.In an age when even meals are rarely made from scratch, homespun easily acquires the glow of nostalgia. The objects Ulrich investigates unravel those simplified illusions, revealing important clues to the culture and people who made them. Ulrich uses an Indian basket to explore the uneasy coexistence of native and colonial Americans. A piece of silk embroidery reveals racial and class distinctions, and two old spinning wheels illuminate the connections between colonial cloth-making and war. Pulling these divergent threads together, Ulrich demonstrates how early Americans made, used, sold, and saved textiles in order to assert their identities, shape relationships, and create history." [from the publisher]
Originally published: Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1990.
Includes bibliographical references (p. [297]-302] and index.
Summary
The essays cover folk religion, folk medicine, sectarian costume, traditional cookery, and the folklife of the Pennsylvania Dutch, specifically Harvest Home, witch tales, Fraktur, and sauerkraut for New Year.
This book studies the writings of Elizabeth Fergusson, Hannah Griffitts, Deborah Logan, Annis Stockton, and Susanna Wright.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 235-276) and index.
Summary
"They wrote and exchanged thousands of poems and maintained elaborate handwritten commonplace books of memorabilia. Through their creativity and celebrated hospitality , they initiated a salon culture in their great country houses in the Delaware Valley .... Susan Sabile shows that these female writers sought to memorialize their lives and aesthetic experience - a purpose that stands in marked contrast to the civic concerns of male authors in the republican era." [from the dust cover]
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.
vii, 131 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 29 cm.
Series
Publications of the Pennsylvania German Society ; series 2, volume 49
Notes
Includes bibliographical references (pages 125-126) and index.
Contents
Oley Valley, breadbasket of colonial Philadelphia -- Jefferson's 1803 Republic and the farming gentry -- Conestoga wagon commerce -- Ore mines, iron furnaces, and flour mills -- Domestic material culture of the Oley Valley -- Water-powered sawmills, gristmills, and bridges -- Antebellum aristocracy and architecture -- Nineteenth century Oley Valley through rare Fegley and Moyer photographs -- Religious diversification and church settlements.
