A New Nation of Goods: The Material Culture of Early America

Early American Studies

by David Jaffee

In the middle of the nineteenth century, middle-class Americans embraced a new culture of domestic consumption, one that centered on chairs and clocks as well as family portraits and books. How did that new world of goods, represented by Victorian parlors filled with overstuffed furniture and daguerreotype portraits, come into being? A New Nation of Goods highlights the significant role of provincial artisans in four crafts in the northeastern United States—chairmaking, clockmaking, portrait painting, and book publishing—to explain the shift from preindustrial society to an entirely new configuration of work, commodities, and culture. As a whole, the book proposes an innovative analysis of early nineteenth-century industrialization and the development of a middle-class consumer culture. It relies on many of the objects beloved by decorative arts scholars and collectors to evoke the vitality of village craft production and culture in the decades after the War of Independence.

A New Nation of Goods grounds its broad narrative of cultural change in case studies of artisans, consumers, and specific artifacts. Each chapter opens with an "object lesson" and weaves an object-based analysis together with the richness of individual lives. The path that such craftspeople and consumers took was not inevitable; on the contrary, as historian David Jaffee vividly demonstrates, it was strewn with alternative outcomes, such as decentralized production with specialized makers. The richly illustrated book offers a collective biography of the post-Revolutionary generation, gathering together the case studies of producers and consumers who embraced these changes, those who opposed them, or, most significantly, those who fashioned the myriad small changes that coalesced into a new Victorian cultural order that none of them had envisioned or entirely appreciated.

Genres: Material Culture, History, United States, 18th Century, Art History, 19th Century

424 pages, Paperback

First published August 17, 2010

Reviews

[Naya]

Everyone wish me luck on my thesis

[Kathleen Hulser]

Fascinating studies of the way the taste for things evolves in the early Republic in the crucial period before mass markets really take hold. Jaffee's originality lies in how he correlates changes in the structure of knowledge with the commercialization of the countryside -- showing how self-education and a thirst for books, newspapers, almanacs and the company of like-minded readers over-lapped with appetites for new things such as clocks, portraits, mirrors, more comfortable chairs and more functional tables. His discussion of synergies between ideas and objects is grounded in enthusiasm for material culture and appealing examples drawn from northeastern New England that allowed craft production and reading in winter to alternate with the busy summer farm season.

His well-written essays are rendered more piquant by a current reader's awareness of certain resonances with the digital world of today: the thirst for cultural knowledge, outside of what was dispensed by the college-educated clergy from the pulpit, resembles on a very small scale the curiosity of fidgity-fingered Googlers; the quaintly earnest Marlborough Society of Social Enquirers or Deerfield Young Ladies Literary Society may evoke an internet discussion board. The realm of things discussed echo the wares so keenly evaluated on Antiques Roadshow, and despite his superb scholarly credentials, Jaffee is no stranger to that lure. His populist soul allows for the appeal of sense experience then and now, and accommodates the human impulse for the aesthetic experience in a broadly vernacular key.

[Katie Wilson]

In trying to be a history of American material culture this book falls short. Too much analysis and not enough context.