The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America - (Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American Histo) by Jennifer Van Horn

About the Book

"Over the course of the eighteenth century, Anglo-Americans purchased an unprecedented number and array of goods. [Van Horn] 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"--

Book 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.

Review Quotes

"An important contribution to understanding how elite identity was produced during a critical period in American history."--Journal of American History

"Forms a powerful testament to the value of true interdisciplinarity in its ability to advance histories of portraiture, decorative arts, and print culture as well as civil society, political identity, and gender and sexuality."--William and Mary Quarterly

"Imaginatively developed, extensively documented, and well written. Recommended."--CHOICE

"In her insightful analysis of prints of port municipalities, portraits of men and women of status, tombstones, and ornate furniture, Jennifer Van Horn's study of British America reveals . . . [a] compelling story. . . . [of] a consumer revolution [that] greatly influenced the American Revolution."--Eighteenth-Century Studies

"Provides a convincing argument for the centrality of material culture studies to the ever-evolving American historical imagination. . . . Van Horn offers deft integration of material, visual, textual, emotional, and embodied evidence."--Winterthur Portfolio

"Represents some of the best of material culture scholarship, blending new information and ideas that are stretched to thought-provoking but not always documentable observations."--Panorama: Journal of the AHAA

"This is an exceptional example of the recent turn in material culture studies toward object assemblages. . . . Van Horn's work reveals how objects and people were integral to the networks that defined new individual and group identities within an emerging social order."--Journal of Southern History