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| xi Acknowledgments Like my first book this one has been a long time in the making and has benefited from innumerable gestures of support, assistance, and encouragement. Special thanks must go again to Martha Banta, for showing me what it means to read and think and write with breadth and imagination and care; and to Eric Sundquist for (in this case) introducing me to the work of Charles Chesnutt. Once again I am also glad to thank the many colleagues, advisees, and friends who have read portions of the manuscript, talked with me about this project, or simply provided inspiration, including Oliver Arnold, Dave Ball, Peter Betjemann, Catherine Bishir, Christine Boyer, Daphne Brooks, Adrienne Brown, Eduardo Cadava, Anne Cheng, Judith Ferszt, Diana Fuss, Simon Gikandi, Dirk Hartog, Briallen Hopper, Greg Jackson, Claudia Johnson, Lois Leveen, Sarah Luria, Beth Machlan, Lee Mitchell, Jeff Nunokawa, Hollis Robbins, Valerie Smith, Vance Smith, Thorin Tritter, Sean Wilentz, and Michael Wood. I must also thank all the students in American Studies 201: American Places who for more than a decade have engaged me in such rich discussions about space and place. I owe a particular debt to the staff of the Winterthur Research Fellowship Program at the Winterthur Library, where some of the most critical research for this book took place, particularly Gretchen Buggeln, Pat Elliott, and Gary Kulick, as well as the extraordinary group of research fellows and faculty who made me feel so welcome during my stay there: Peter Brownlee, Melissa Duffes, Stephanie Foote, Ritchie Garrison, Holly Heinzer, Bernard Herman, Arlette Klaric, Stephen Long, Ellen Menefee, Cynthia Munro, Mike Murphy, and Barbara Penner. I am grateful to the Environment and Culture Caucus of the American Studies Association for helping me find a home in what I like to call the “built environment wing” of the ECC, especially founding members Joni Adamson and Adam Sweeting . I also wish to thank the co-panelists and audience members who heard and commented on early versions of portions of this book at meetings of xii | Acknowledgments the American Studies Association; the Modern Language Association; the Winterthur Scholars Seminar; the Delaware Seminar in Art, History, and Material Culture; and the Princeton Society of Fellows. Librarians, libraries, and societies near and far have helped me at every stage of this project. At Princeton I thank in particular the Princeton University Library (including Circulation, Interlibrary Loan, Graphic Arts, and Rare Books and Special Collections), the Architecture Library, and the Marquand Library of Art and Archaeology. At the Winterthur Library I thank Rich McKinstry, Helena Richardson, Jeanne Solensky, and especially Neville Thompson. I am also grateful to the research staffs at the Hagley Library and Archives and the El Paso Public Library for their assistance in helping me locate materials. I thank Nancy Carlisle of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities for putting me in touch with Jane S. Tucker of Wicasset, Maine, and Jane S. Tucker for letting me spend time studying the veritable library of Vantine’s artifacts to be found in Castle Tucker, her family home, in order better to understand their decorative use in situ. I also thank the several Vantine’s collectors who graciously sent me photocopies of catalogs not available in the conventional archives. At NYU Press I thank series editors Priscilla Wald, David Kazanjian, and Elizabeth McHenry; my editors, Eric Zinner, Ciara McLaughlin, and Despina Papazoglou Gimbel, and my copyeditor, Susan Ecklund; and especially the two anonymous readers whose detailed reports were so tremendously useful to me during the late phases of revision. For preparing the photographs of most of the images in this book I thank Princeton’s ever-cheerful John Blazejewski. Research and fellowship support for this project has been generously provided by Princeton University, including the Department of English; the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation; and the National Endowment for the Humanities, which sponsored my semester at Winterthur. I thank each of these institutions in particular for their support of interdisciplinary work. Portions of this study have appeared in print, and I am grateful for permission to reprint them here. An early version of chapter 2 appeared in American Quarterly 51 (1999), and an early version of chapter 1 appeared in Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Hollis Robbins, eds., In Search of Hannah Crafts (2004). I must close by thanking those with whom I share my own house: my wife, Andrea, whose professional journals on planning and architecture [18.191.211.66] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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