Overview

This book offers a heavily illustrated comparative study of artifacts and architecture from three historically linked regions. """"Material Culture in Anglo-America"""" examines the extent to which regions project cultural identities through the material forms of objects, buildings, and constructed environments. This volume explores the material constitution of the West Indies, Carolina lowcountry, and Chesapeake Tidewater - three historically related regions that shared strong likenesses in culture, commerce, and political development in the colonial through antebellum eras, yet also cultivated the distinctive regional flair with which they are now associated. The contributors - an impressive and international array of historical archeologists, art historians, literary historians, museum curators, social historians, geographers, and historians of material culture - combine theoretical reflections on the poetics of representative material culture with empirical studies of how things were made and put to use in specific locales. They argue that the material culture of urban and rural settings interpenetrated each other and discuss the complications of class, race, religion, and settler culture within developing regions to reveal how all of these factors influenced the richness of crafted artifacts. The study is further grounded in several striking case studies that dramatically demonstrate how constructed things can embody communal self-understanding while still participating in an overarching transatlantic cultural community.

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9781570038525

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David S. Shields is the McClintock Professor of Southern Letters in the Departments of English and History at the University of South Carolina, editor of the journal Early American Literature, and director of the Southern Texts Society.

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