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Reviews in American History 34.2 (2006) 156-161



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Homes and Hopes:

The Construction of Urban Society in the Early Republic

Bernard L. Herman. Town House: Architecture and Material Life in the Early American City, 1780–1830. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. 320 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $45.00.

The handsomely illustrated Town House by Bernard L. Herman offers an interesting exploration of life in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and will be of interest to many who study the American city. In this carefully and creatively written book, objects "are not relegated to the status of simple illustrations but move to the fore as key elements for deciphering and writing the past" (p. 1). This is a book for readers interested in both architectural and social history as Herman follows a material culture approach, which utilizes both artifacts and written records. The author begins his study by clearly stating that his intention is to write about urban dwellings as well as those who built them and lived in them in the years from 1780 to 1830. Given these goals, Herman effectively organizes Town House in eight chapters, each containing house plans and other illustrations. Herman starts each chapter with a vignette that strives to humanize and introduce the relevant material.

This is not a book devoted to or limited to construction methods. Rather, Herman presents houses as indications of urban order and conflict. He seeks to explore the various ways that "people employed town houses as symbolic representations of self and community" and notes "cities were constant objects of idealization" (pp. 2, 5). Herman, who makes his points by considering town houses along the eastern seaboard, north and south, also explores architectural development in London and several English seafaring communities such as Bristol and Whitby. He is concerned with establishing the nature of the transatlantic world that was so important in shaping early American cities. Prominently featured are the communities of Boston, Massachusetts; Portsmouth, New Hampshire; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Charleston, South Carolina. Strikingly absent is New York.

Herman is careful to establish a foundation for readers to understand his discussion. He analyzes the Paul Revere House and the Pierce-Hichborn House, both located in North Square, Boston. The former represents a seventeenth-century [End Page 156] style while the latter speaks of the eighteenth century. It is this second house that clearly shows "artifactual evidence documenting a dynamic process of architectural design"(p. 17). The Dutch and London influences on these and other structures are related. Herman describes two other Boston homes, the Hutchinson Mansion and the Clark-Frankland House, characterizing them as "self-assuredly stylish and aggressively elite" (p. 19). He notes, every eighteenth-century English provincial seaport and market town on both sides of the Atlantic, from Whitby on the Yorkshire coast to Charleston in South Carolina contained examples of such stylish homes. Thus, he does not feel the need to provide a comprehensive guide to townhouses of the era. Rather, in the rest of the book, he chooses to illuminate and explore basic themes.

One point of emphasis is that builders and owners were mightily concerned with "presentations of the self" as seen, for example, in the New Castle, Delaware home constructed by Kensey Johns in 1789. The Kensey Johns House is significant to Herman's discussion because it demonstrates that choices are made and the "design process is marked by the consideration, rejection, and acceptance of multiple possibilities" (p. 27). The author carries this point further, somewhat less successfully, by using the childhood journals of Caroline Burgwin Clitherall as a narrative to chart "the way that she knew and experienced her aunt and uncle's house" in Bristol, England prior to the American Revolution (p. 31).

The analysis of merchant family homes in Chapter Two carries the same strength and weakness as the memoirs by beginning with a Norfolk, Virginia homeowner's contemplation of the published recipe for a desert of spun sugar. Herman attempts to stimulate our imaginations (and perhaps...

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