The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America | Jennifer Van Horn

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456 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 11 color plates., 130 halftones, notes, index

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-5219-1
Published: February 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4696-2957-5
Published: February 2017

Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press

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Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press

Awards & distinctions

Finalist, 2018 George Washington Prize

Honorable Mention, 2018 Louis Gottschalk Prize, American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies

Over the course of the eighteenth century, Anglo-Americans purchased an unprecedented number and array of goods. The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America investigates these diverse artifacts—from portraits and city views to gravestones, dressing furniture, and prosthetic devices—to explore how elite American consumers assembled objects to form a new civil society on the margins of the British Empire. In this interdisciplinary transatlantic study, artifacts emerge as key players in the formation of Anglo-American communities and eventually of American citizenship. Deftly interweaving analysis of images with furniture, architecture, clothing, and literary works, Van Horn reconstructs the networks of goods that bound together consumers in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston.

Moving beyond emulation and the desire for social status as the primary motivators for consumption, Van Horn shows that Anglo-Americans’ material choices were intimately bound up with their efforts to distance themselves from Native Americans and African Americans. She also traces women’s contested place in forging provincial culture. As encountered through a woman’s application of makeup at her dressing table or an amputee’s donning of a wooden leg after the Revolutionary War, material artifacts were far from passive markers of rank or political identification. They made Anglo-American society.

About the Author

Jennifer Van Horn is assistant professor of art history and history at the University of Delaware.
For more information about Jennifer Van Horn, visit the Author Page.

Reviews

“Imaginatively developed, extensively documented, and well written. Recommended.”--Choice

“Forms a powerful testament to the value of true interdisciplinarity in its ability to advance histories of portraiture, decorative arts, and print culture as well as civil society, political identity, and gender and sexuality.”--The William and Mary Quarterly

“Represents some of the best of material culture scholarship, blending new information and ideas that are stretched to thought-provoking but not always documentable observations.”--Panorama: Journal of the AHAA

“This is an exceptional example of the recent turn in material culture studies toward object assemblages.”--The Journal of Southern History

“Van Horn’s work reveals how objects and people were integral to the networks that defined new individual and group identities within an emerging social order.”--The Journal of Southern History

“Provides a convincing argument for the centrality of material culture studies to the ever-evolving American historical imagination. . . . Van Horn offers deft integration of material, visual, textual, emotional, and embodied evidence.”--Winterthur Portfolio

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Related Subjects

Colonial, Revolutionary Era & Early American History

Fine Arts

Folklife & Folklore / Material Culture

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