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  • Beyond the AtlanticVisual and Material Culture Studies of Early America
  • David Jaffee (bio)
New Views of New England: Studies in Material and Visual Culture, 1680–1830 Edited by martha j. mcnamara and georgia b. barnhill Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 2012 277 pp.
Philadelphia on Stone: Commercial Lithography in Philadelphia, 1828–1878 Edited by erika piola University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012 295 pp.
Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America jennifer l. roberts Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014 226 pp.
Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became a Postcolonial Nation kariann akemi yokota New York: Oxford University Press, 2011 354 pp.

Material and visual culture studies of early America have traced distinct but intersecting paths, and the publication of these four books offers us the opportunity to consider their connection in contemporary scholarship. “Material culture studies,” as defined by Martha McNamara, “can most succinctly be described as an analysis of the artifacts of human endeavor with the goal of understanding their expressive function in a particular society at a particular time” (xxiv). It has a long lineage in the early [End Page 125] American context, going back to antiquarian studies of New England in the era of the colonial revival (1870s–1940s) by historians such as Alice Morse Earle, along with the introduction of the field into the academy in the 1960s through research that often focused on furniture and vernacular architecture. Visual culture studies, by contrast, emphasizes the act of seeing as embedded within disciplinary regimes, as opposed to the artifacts’ own “expressive power.” In their study of early American visual culture, art historians have emphasized oil portraiture of merchants and magistrates and landscape of the post-Revolutionary era via attention to the Hudson River School (1850s–1870s). When visual studies scholars were willing to consider the reproduced image, they focused largely on mezzotint and other intaglio processes (prints made with images incised into the surface). Patterns of regionalism and the Atlantic port cities have received the most attention: especially the cultural centers of Boston and Philadelphia, with their clusters of immigrant craftsmen, urban workshops for high-style products, and affluent customers. Production has heavily weighted the scale, although recently attention has expanded to the culture of collecting.1

These outstanding books offer the opportunity to better understand the importance of interdisciplinary developments in revising and revitalizing the two fields. Two are collections of essays that celebrate the completion of long-term projects in the material and visual culture of New England and Philadelphia, each hosted by important libraries and cultural institutions in their respective regions. Both collections trace their origins to notable classics in the field of early American material and visual culture: Philadelphia on Stone to Nicholas Wainwright’s 1958 Philadelphia in the Romantic Age of Lithography, published by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and New Views of New England to the 1982 New England Begins exhibit at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and its three-volume catalog, New England Begins: The Seventeenth Century (Fairbanks and Trent). While not explicitly offered as a work of material culture, the third study, a monograph by Kariann Yokota, Unbecoming British, relies on imported commodities such as porcelain, tea, maps, and textbooks to trace the long and winding road of American efforts to achieve cultural independence, as the transit of individuals and information remained heavily in Britain’s debt. Finally, the most recent publication, Jennifer L. Roberts’s Transporting Visions, takes on what a “material visual culture” would look like in practice and [End Page 126] theory through three case studies stretching from John Singleton Copley to John James Audubon to Asher Durand and back and forth across the Atlantic. All four volumes take up the charge of editors Wendy Bellion and Mónica Domínguez Torres in their special issue of the Winterthur Portfolio in 2011, Objects in Motion, where they questioned scholars’ continued reliance on the model of core and periphery, metropolis and provinces, or at best transatlantic relations and called for attention to cross-cultural or even “global connections.”

Several essays in New Views of New England pay particular attention to synthesizing the perceptual and the material realms. Martin Bruckner’s “The...

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