Description
Book SynopsisIn 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? A New Nation of Goods 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 In
Trade Review
"A magnificent effort. A New Nation of Goods effectively merges commerce and culture as twinned engines that promoted the democratization of knowledge and the commercialization of the countryside. The range of material things covered in this book is impressive, from paintings to prints, from clocks to chairs, from sideboards to daguerreotypes, to mention but a few." * Robert Blair St. George, University of Pennsylvania *
"A New Nation of Goods has much to recommend it. Interdisciplinary, the work leverages a wealth of sources, from probate inventories and census records to patent applications and auction catalogs. It . . . asks us to reconsider many of our long-standing assumptions about the diffusion of culture in rural communities and the relative pace and influence of market activity." * Journal of the Early Republic *
