Search results for ""Author George W. Boudreau""

In this volume, scholars from various disciplines show how physical objects can expand our comprehension of how people lived, worked, and thought during the colonial and early national periods. Inspired by the “material turn” that introduced the legibility of objects across humanities disciplines, the essays in this collection show how “reading” material objects from sites such as Monticello, Salem, and the Connecticut River Valley brings to light significant dimensions of social experience and cultural practices that are not visible in the written record of early America. Reading objects for evidence of the lives and values of the individuals and groups that imagined, fabricated, bought, and used them, the contributors examine the migration of items such as chairs, fashionable dressing tables, portraits, and even natural relics. In doing so, they uncover complex economic, ethical, and mnemonic issues; investigate the political life of seemingly unpolitical things such as a rock in Plymouth, Massachusetts; and consider the environmental riches and extraction industries behind early American prosperity and ingenuity.Together, these essays demonstrate the value of attending closely to visual and material culture, as objects can be derided or cherished as proxies for people and ideas. A Material World will interest both academics and enthusiasts of visual and material culture, as well as anyone interested in life and society in early America.In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume are Paul G. E. Clemens, Edward S. Cooke Jr., Stephen G. Hague, Patricia Johnston, Laura C. Keim, Ellen G. Miles, Emily A. Murphy, Nancy Siegel, Carol Eaton Soltis, and Jennifer Van Horn.

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George Washington lived in an age of revolutions, during which he faced political upheaval, war, economic change, and social shifts. These revolutions affected American women in profound ways, and the women Washington knew—personally, professionally, and politically—lived lives that reveal these multifaceted transformations. Although Washington often operated in male-dominated arenas, he participated in complex and meaningful relationships with women from across society.A lively and accessibly written volume, Women in George Washington’s World highlights some of the women—Black and white, free and enslaved—whom Washington knew. Women who admired and memorialized him, women who provided him love and solace, women who frustrated him, and women who worked for or against him—all of these women are chronicled through their own experiences and identities. The essays, written by established and emerging historians of gender, reveal the lives of a diverse group of women, including plantation mistresses and enslaved workers, Loyalists and Patriots, poets and socialites, as well as mothers, wives, and sisters. Collectively, women emerge as strong actors during the American Revolution and its aftermath, not merely passive spectators or occasional participants. Although usually not on battlefields or in government offices, women made choices and acted in ways that affected their own, their families’, and sometimes even the nation’s future.

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