Making Furniture in Preindustrial America

Making Furniture in Preindustrial America PDF Author: Edward S. Cooke Jr.
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 142143606X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
Cooke offers a fresh and appealing cross-disciplinary study of the furnituremakers, social structure, household possessions, and surviving pieces of furniture of two neighboring New England communities. Winner of the Decorative Arts Society, Inc.'s Charles F. Montgomery Prize Originally published in 1996. In Making Furniture in Preindustrial America Edward S. Cooke Jr. offers a fresh and appealing cross-disciplinary study of the furnituremakers, social structure, household possessions, and surviving pieces of furniture of two neighboring New England communities. Drawing on both documentary and artifactual sources, Cooke explores the interplay among producer, process, and style in demonstrating why and how the social economies of these two seemingly similar towns differed significantly during the late colonial and early national periods. Throughout the latter half of the eighteenth century, Cooke explains, the yeoman town of Newtown relied on native joiners whose work satisfied the expectations of their fellow townspeople. These traditionalists combined craftwork with farming and made relatively plain, conservative furniture. By contrast, the typical joiner in the neighboring gentry town of Woodbury was the immigrant innovator. Born and raised elsewhere in Connecticut and serving a diverse clientele, these craftsmen were free of the cultural constraints that affected their Newtown contemporaries. Relying almost entirely on furnituremaking for their livelihood, they were free to pay greater attention to stylistically sensitive features than to mere function.

Making Furniture in Preindustrial America

Making Furniture in Preindustrial America PDF Author: Edward S. Cooke Jr.
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 142143606X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 372

Get Book Here

Book Description
Cooke offers a fresh and appealing cross-disciplinary study of the furnituremakers, social structure, household possessions, and surviving pieces of furniture of two neighboring New England communities. Winner of the Decorative Arts Society, Inc.'s Charles F. Montgomery Prize Originally published in 1996. In Making Furniture in Preindustrial America Edward S. Cooke Jr. offers a fresh and appealing cross-disciplinary study of the furnituremakers, social structure, household possessions, and surviving pieces of furniture of two neighboring New England communities. Drawing on both documentary and artifactual sources, Cooke explores the interplay among producer, process, and style in demonstrating why and how the social economies of these two seemingly similar towns differed significantly during the late colonial and early national periods. Throughout the latter half of the eighteenth century, Cooke explains, the yeoman town of Newtown relied on native joiners whose work satisfied the expectations of their fellow townspeople. These traditionalists combined craftwork with farming and made relatively plain, conservative furniture. By contrast, the typical joiner in the neighboring gentry town of Woodbury was the immigrant innovator. Born and raised elsewhere in Connecticut and serving a diverse clientele, these craftsmen were free of the cultural constraints that affected their Newtown contemporaries. Relying almost entirely on furnituremaking for their livelihood, they were free to pay greater attention to stylistically sensitive features than to mere function.

The Carriage Trade

The Carriage Trade PDF Author: Thomas A. Kinney
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801879463
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 462

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Book Description
Co-Winner of the 2005 Hagley Business History Book Prize given by the Busines History Conference. In 1926, the Carriage Builders' National Association met for the last time, signaling the automobile's final triumph over the horse-drawn carriage. Only a decade earlier, carriages and wagons were still a common sight on every Main Street in America. In the previous century, carriage-building had been one of the largest and most dynamic industries in the country. In this sweeping study of a forgotten trade, Thomas A. Kinney extends our understanding of nineteenth-century American industrialization far beyond the steel mill and railroad. The legendary Studebaker Brothers Manufacturing Company in 1880 produced a hundred wagons a day—one every six minutes. Across the country, smaller factories fashioned vast quantities of buggies, farm wagons, and luxury carriages. Today, if we think of carriage and wagon at all, we assume it merely foreshadowed the automobile industry. Yet., the carriage industry epitomized a batch-work approach to production that flourished for decades. Contradicting the model of industrial development in which hand tools, small firms, and individual craftsmanship simply gave way to mechanized factories, the carriage industry successfully employed small-scale business and manufacturing practices throughout its history. The Carriage Trade traces the rise and fall of this heterogeneous industry, from the pre-industrial shop system to the coming of the automobile, using as case studies Studebaker, the New York–based luxury carriage-maker Brewsters, and dozens of smallerfirms from around the country. Kinney also explores the experiences of the carriage and wagon worker over the life of the industry. Deeply researched and strikingly original, this study contributes a vivid chapter to the story of America's industrial revolution.

A Companion to American Art

A Companion to American Art PDF Author: John Davis
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118542541
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 680

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Book Description
A Companion to American Art presents 35 newly-commissioned essays by leading scholars that explore the methodology, historiography, and current state of the field of American art history. Features contributions from a balance of established and emerging scholars, art and architectural historians, and other specialists Includes several paired essays to emphasize dialogue and debate between scholars on important contemporary issues in American art history Examines topics such as the methodological stakes in the writing of American art history, changing ideas about what constitutes “Americanness,” and the relationship of art to public culture Offers a fascinating portrait of the evolution and current state of the field of American art history and suggests future directions of scholarship

The Weaver's Craft

The Weaver's Craft PDF Author: Adrienne D. Hood
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812203240
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Cloth was one of the most important commodities in the early modern world, and colonial North Americans had to develop creative strategies to acquire it. Although early European settlers came from societies in which hand textile production was central to the economy, local conditions in North America interacted with traditional craft structures to create new patterns of production and consumption. The Weaver's Craft examines the development of cloth manufacture in early Pennsylvania from its roots in seventeenth-century Europe to the beginning of industrialization. Adrienne D. Hood's focus on Pennsylvania and the long sweep of history yields a new understanding of the complexities of early American fabric production and the regional variations that led to distinct experiences of industrialization. Drawing on an extensive array of primary sources, combined with a quantitative approach, the author argues that in contrast to New England, rural Pennsylvania women spun the yarn that a small group of trained male artisans wove into cloth on a commercial basis throughout the eighteenth century. Their production was considerably augmented by consumers purchasing cheap cloth from Europe and Asia, making them active participants in a global marketplace. Hood's painstaking research and numerous illustrations of textile equipment, swatch books, and consumer goods will be of interest to both scholars and craftspeople.

Wood

Wood PDF Author: Harvey Green
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780143112693
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 500

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Book Description
A rich, authoritative look at a material that plays an essential role in human culture Wood has been a central part of human life throughout the world for thousands of years. In an intoxicating mix of science, history, and practical information, historian and woodworker Harvey Green considers this vital material's place on the planet. What makes one wood hard and one soft? How did we find it, tame it? Where does it fit into the histories of technology, architecture, and industrialization, of empire, exploration, and settlement? Spanning the surprising histories of the log cabin and Windsor chair, the deep truth about veneer, the role of wood in the American Revolution, the disappearance of the rain forests, the botany behind the baseball bat, and much more, Wood is a deep and satisfying look at one of our most treasured resources.

From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers

From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers PDF Author: Allan Kulikoff
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807860786
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 501

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Book Description
With this book, Allan Kulikoff offers a sweeping new interpretation of the origins and development of the small farm economy in Britain's mainland American colonies. Examining the lives of farmers and their families, he tells the story of immigration to the colonies, traces patterns of settlement, analyzes the growth of markets, and assesses the impact of the Revolution on small farm society. Beginning with the dispossession of the peasantry in early modern England, Kulikoff follows the immigrants across the Atlantic to explore how they reacted to a hostile new environment and its Indian inhabitants. He discusses how colonists secured land, built farms, and bequeathed those farms to their children. Emphasizing commodity markets in early America, Kulikoff shows that without British demand for the colonists' crops, settlement could not have begun at all. Most important, he explores the destruction caused during the American Revolution, showing how the war thrust farmers into subsistence production and how they only gradually regained their prewar prosperity.

Conversing by Signs

Conversing by Signs PDF Author: Robert Blair St. George
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807864714
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 481

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Book Description
The people of colonial New England lived in a densely metaphoric landscape--a world where familiars invaded bodies without warning, witches passed with ease through locked doors, and houses blew down in gusts of angry, providential wind. Meaning, Robert St. George argues, was layered, often indirect, and inextricably intertwined with memory, apprehension, and imagination. By exploring the linkages between such cultural expressions as seventeenth-century farmsteads, witchcraft narratives, eighteenth-century crowd violence, and popular portraits of New England Federalists, St. George demonstrates that in early New England, things mattered as much as words in the shaping of metaphor. These forms of cultural representation--architecture and gravestones, metaphysical poetry and sermons, popular religion and labor politics--are connected through what St. George calls a 'poetics of implication.' Words, objects, and actions, referentially interdependent, demonstrate the continued resilience and power of seventeenth-century popular culture throughout the eighteenth century. Illuminating their interconnectedness, St. George calls into question the actual impact of the so-called Enlightenment, suggesting just how long a shadow the colonial climate of fear and inner instability cast over the warm glow of the early national period.

Safety First

Safety First PDF Author: Mark Aldrich
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801854057
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 450

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Book Description
The first full account of why the American workplace became so dangerous, and why it is now so much safer. In 1907, American coal mines killed 3,242 men in occupational accidents, probably an all-time high both for the industry and for all laboring accidents in this country. In December alone, two mines at Monongah, West Virginia, blew up, killing 362 men. Railroad accidents that same year killed another 4,534. At a single South Chicago steel plant, 46 workers died on the job. In mines and mills and on railroads, work in America had become more dangerous than in any other advanced nation. Ninety years later, such numbers and events seem extraordinary. Although serious accidents do still occur, industrial jobs in the United States have become vastly and dramatically safer. In Safety First, Mark Aldrich offers the first full account of why the American workplace became so dangerous, and why it is now so much safer. Aldrich, an economist who once served as an OSHA investigator, first describes the increasing dangers of industrial work in late-nineteenth-century America as a result of technological change, careless work practices, and a legal system that minimized employers' responsibility for industrial accidents. He then explores the developments that led to improved safety—government regulation, corporate publicizing of safety measures, and legislation that raised the costs of accidents by requiring employers to pay workmen's compensation. At the heart of these changes, Aldrich contends, was the emergence of a safety ideology that stressed both worker and management responsibility for work accidents—a stunning reversal of earlier attitudes.

Historical Dictionary of New England

Historical Dictionary of New England PDF Author: Peter C. Holloran
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538102196
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 661

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Book Description
New England, the most clearly defined region in the United States, includes the six states of Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont. First colonized by the French in 1604 and the British in 1607, the New England colonies were the first to secede from the British Empire and were among the first states admitted to the union. No region has claimed more presidents as native sons (seven) or produced more men and women of exceptional accomplishment and fame. Many Americans see New England as a touchstone for the founding ideas of the nation, and the region served as a source of inspiration for many artists and writers. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of New England contains a chronology, an introduction, appendix, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 700 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, places, institutions, and events. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about New England.

Ships for the Seven Seas

Ships for the Seven Seas PDF Author: Thomas Heinrich
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421436868
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 405

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Book Description
Thomas R. Heinrich explores American shipbuilding from the workshop level to subcontracting networks spanning the Delaware Valley. Winner of the North American Society for Oceanic History's John Lyman Book Award Originally published in 1996. Sustained by a skilled work force and the Pennsylvania iron and steel industry, Philadelphia shipbuilders negotiated the transition from wooden to iron hull construction earlier and far more easily that most other builders. Between the Civil War and World War I, Philadelphia emerged as the vital center of American shipbuilding, constructing a wide variety of vessel types such as passenger liners, freighters, battleships, and cruisers. In Ships for the Seven Seas, Thomas R. Heinrich explores this complex industry from the workshop level to subcontracting networks spanning the Delaware Valley. He describes entrepreneurial strategies and industrial change that facilitated the rise of major shipbuilding firms; how naval architecture, marine engineering, and craft skills evolved as iron and steel overtook wood as the basic construction material; and how changes in domestic and international trade and the rise of the American steel navy helped generate vessel contracts for local builders. Heinrich also examines the formation of the military-industrial complex in the context of naval contracting. Contributing to current debates in business history, Ships for the Seven Seas explains how proprietary ownership and batch production strategies enabled late nineteenth-century builders to supply volatile markets with custom-built steamships. But large-scale naval construction in the 1920s eroded production flexibility, Heinrich argues, and since then, ill-conceived merchant marine policies and naval contracting procedures have brought about a structural crisis in American shipbuilding and the demise of the venerable Philadelphia shipyards.