New Views of New England: Studies in Material and Visual Culture, 1680-1830

by Martha J. McNamara (Editor), Georgia B. Barnhill (Editor)

Overview

Beautifully illustrated, this collection of essays will introduce the reader to a rich, surprising, thought-provoking, and entirely new view of early New England. Eleven essays written by historians, archaeologists, art and architectural historians, and literary scholars recast our understanding of New England by setting its material and visual culture in new contexts. Essays on the archaeology of seventeenth-century Maine settlements, the geographical knowledge of Salem sailors and ship captains, the mid-eighteenth-century cartographic depictions of Boston, and the built environment of Maine in the early nineteenth century all place New England into the broader purview of a transoceanic movement of people, ideas, and objects.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780985254308
Publisher:	Distribution
Publication date:	10/10/2012
Pages:	279
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.50(h) x 1.20(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Martha J. McNamara, author of From Tavern to Courthouse: Architecture and Ritual in American Law, 1658–1860, is director of the New England Arts and Architecture Program in the Department of Art at Wellesley College. Georgia B. Barnhill is the founding director of the Center for Historic American Visual Culture at the American Antiquarian Society.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Foreword Georgia B. Barnhill xix

Introduction: The Materiality of Experience in Early New England Martha J. McNamara xxiii

Early New England's Oceanic Context

The Archaeology of 1690: Status and Material Life on New England's Northern Frontier Emerson W. Baker 1

Depicting Geographic Knowledge: Mariners' Drawings from Salem, Massachusetts Patricia Johnston 17

Navigation, Vision, and Empire: Eighteenth-Century Engraved Views of Boston in a British Atlantic Context Kevin Muller 47

Buildings, Landscapes, and the Representation of Authority on the Eastern Frontier Kevin D. Murphy 69

Domestic Exchange and Regional Identity

"The Remainder of Our Effects We Must Leave Behind": American Loyalists and the Meaning of Things Katherine Rieder 97

The Color of Whiteness: Picturing Race on Ivory Catherine E. Kelly 129

Hares Haeredem: The Spectator Through Samuel Dexter's Spectacles Katherine Stebbins McCaffrey 155

"Often concerned in funerals": Ritual, Material Culture, and the Large Funeral in the Age of Samuel Sewall Steven C. Bullock 181

Envisioning New England

The "New England" Cartouche: Tablets, Tableaux, and Theatricality in Eighteenth-Century Cartography Martin Brückner 215

New England's Ends Wendy Bellion 245

List of Contributors 263

Index 267