Town House

“Herman’s work, as it captures and restores to modern readers the ambiguity and lyricism of an earlier built environment, continues to show us how valuable such studies are, and makes that scholarship especially accessible, exciting, and inviting.”—Journal of the Early Republic

“A wide-ranging and amply illustrated work. . . . The book abounds in insights.”—American Historical Review

“Exemplary in the field of vernacular architecture. . . . Architectural and urban historians should find Town House illuminating. . . . He has provided a solid foundation for further investigation of the ties between historical forces and material life.”—Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians

“Herman presents a rich, detailed picture of the spatial, material, and cultural life of American cities in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.”—Technology and Culture

“Town House is a most remarkable guided tour of the early American city in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. . . . Herman has dramatically extended the boundaries of our knowledge of the early American city, has provided an important model for future studies, and has made a fresh and compelling case for the scholarly significance of material culture.”—Winterthur Portfolio

“Entwining the histories of dwelling places with those of the humans who dreamed, built, lived, and worked in them, the book offers a fresh perspective on the past lives of port towns stretching from Charleston, South Carolina, to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, with detours to Bristol, Bath, and Baden along the way. Beautifully produced and lavishly illustrated, Herman’s study is often captivating and sometimes transporting.”—William and Mary Quarterly

“Beautifully designed and ingeniously illustrated.” — North Carolina Historical Review

“Town House will definitely appeal to connoisseurs of historic architecture, who will find it an arresting, fascinating, and, in some ways, original book. General readers with a passing interest in the subject also will be rewarded. . . . This book effectively delivers the sobering lesson that no matter the era, houses do not lie.” — Alabama Mobile Register

“Town House is the first study to bring the methods of the new vernacular architectural history to the American city. Bernard Herman ranges far beyond architecture to people these houses, fill them with goods, set them next to their neighbors on the street, and link them to transatlantic predecessors and contemporaries. He shows us not only how these buildings were used, but what they meant to their residents. Town House is a tour de force of architectural and urban history — a book that we have long needed.”—Dell Upton, University of Virginia

“Herman’s latest book is the product of over a decade of research, spanning the Atlantic to encompass the major cities of the east coast of North America and England. This innovative and engaging assessment of a wide range of sources for the social and architectural history of town houses provides many new insights into material life in the North American and English city of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth century.”—Roger Leech, University of Southampton