The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America - Couverture rigide

Horn, Jennifer Van

 
9781469652191: The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America

Synopsis

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.

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À propos de l?auteur

Jennifer Van Horn is assistant professor of art history and history at the University of Delaware.

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Autres éditions populaires du même titre

9781469629568: The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America

Edition présentée

ISBN 10 :  1469629569 ISBN 13 :  9781469629568
Editeur : The University of North Carolina..., 2017
Couverture rigide