Enfilade

From Reaktion Books:

Timon Screech, Tokyo Before Tokyo: Power and Magic in the Shogun’s City of Edo (London: Reaktion Books, 2020), 240 pages, ISBN: 9781789142334, £25 / $40.

Tokyo today is one of the world’s mega-cities, and the centre of a scintillating, hyper-modern culture—but not everyone is aware of its past. Founded in 1590 as the seat of the warlord Tokugawa family, Tokyo, then called ‘Edo’, was the locus of Japanese trade, economics and urban civilization until 1868, when it mutated into Tokyo and became Japan’s modern capital.

This beautifully illustrated book presents important sites and features from the rich history of Edo, drawn from contemporary sources such as diaries, guidebooks and woodblock prints. These include the huge bridge on which the city was centred, the vast castle of the shogun, sumptuous Buddhist temples, bars, kabuki theatres and the Yoshiwara, Edo’s famous red-light district.

Timon Screech is Professor in the History of Art at SOAS, University of London, and a Fellow of the British Academy. He is the author of many books, including Sex and the Floating World: Erotic Images in Japan, 1700–1820 (2nd edn, Reaktion, 2009).

C O N T E N T S

Introduction
1  The Ideal City
2  The Centre of the Shogun’s Realm
3  Edo as Sacred Space
4  Reading Edo Castle
5  The City’s Poetic Presence
6  A Trip to the Yoshiwara
Epilogue: From Edo to Tokyo

References
Selected Sources and Further Reading
General Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Photo Acknowledgements

From Bloomsbury:

Serena Dyer and Chloe Wigston Smith, eds., Material Literacy in Eighteenth-Century Britain: A Nation of Makers (New York: Bloomsbury, 2020), 328 pages, ISBN: 978-1501349614, $135.

The eighteenth century has been hailed for its revolution in consumer culture, but Material Literacy in Eighteenth-Century Britain repositions Britain as a nation of makers. It brings new attention to eighteenth-century craftswomen and men with its focus on the material knowledge possessed not only by professional artisans and amateur makers, but also by skilled consumers. This edited collection gathers together a group of interdisciplinary scholars working in the fields of art history, history, literature, and museum studies to unearth the tactile and tacit knowledge that underpinned fashion, tailoring, and textile production. It invites us into the workshops, drawing rooms, and backrooms of a broad range of creators, and uncovers how production and tacit knowledge extended beyond the factories and machines which dominate industrial histories.

This book illuminates, for the first time, the material literacies learnt, enacted, and understood by British producers and consumers. The skills required for sewing, embroidering, and the textile arts were possessed by a large proportion of the British population: men, women and children, professional and amateur alike. Building on previous studies of shoppers and consumption in the period, as well as narratives of manufacture, these essays document the multiplicity of small producers behind Britain’s consumer revolution, reshaping our understanding of the dynamics between making and objects, consumption and production. It demonstrates how material knowledge formed an essential part of daily life for eighteenth-century Britons. Craft technique, practice, and production, the contributors show, constituted forms of tactile languages that joined makers together, whether they produced objects for profit or pleasure.

Serena Dyer is Lecturer in History of Design and Material Culture at De Montfort University. She has taught at the University of Warwick and the University of Hertfordshire, and was Postdoctoral Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. She was previously Curator of the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture. She has published on albums, wallpaper, consumer culture, and childhood in the eighteenth century. Her book, Material Lives: Women Makers and Consumer Culture in the Eighteenth Century, is forthcoming with Bloomsbury.

Chloe Wigston Smith is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Related Literature and the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies at the University of York. She is the author of Women, Work, and Clothes in the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2013), as well as articles on women in literature, material culture studies and fashion culture. Her current British Academy funded project looks at domestic crafts in the Atlantic world.

C O N T E N T S

List of Figures
List of Tables
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements

1  Serena Dyer (De Montfort University) and Chloe Wigston Smith (University of York), Introduction
2  Ariane Fennetaux (University of Paris), ‘Work’d pockets to my entire satisfaction’: Women and the Multiple Literacies of Making
3  Crystal B. Lake (Wright State University), Needlework Verse
4  Chloe Wigston Smith (University of York), Domestic Crafts at the School of Arts
5  Nicole Pohl (Oxford Brookes University), ‘To Embroider what is Wanting’: Making, Consuming and Mending Textiles in the Lives of the Bluestockings
6  Jon Stobart (Manchester Metropolitan University), Material Literacies of Home Comfort in Georgian England
7  Serena Dyer (De Montfort University), Stitching and Shopping: The Material Literacy of the Consumer
8  Alicia Kerfoot (SUNY Brockport), Stitching the It-Narrative in The History and Adventures of a Lady’s Slippers and Shoes
9  Sarah Howard (Independent Scholar, UK), Making, Measuring and Selling in Hampshire: The Provincial Tailor’s Accounts of George and Benjamin Ferrey
10  Emily Taylor (National Museums Scotland), Gendered Making and Material Knowledge: Tailors and Mantua-Makers, c. 1760–1820
11  Hilary Davidson (University of Sydney), Dress and Dressmaking: Material Evolution in Regency Dress Construction
12  Elisabeth Gernerd (Historic Royal Palaces), Fancy Feathers: The Feather Trade in Britain and the Atlantic World
13  Robbie Richardson (University of Kent), Tomahawks and Scalping Knives: Manufacturing Savagery in Britain
14  Laura Engel (Duquesne University), The Lady Vanishes: Madame Tussaud’s Self Portrait and Material Legacies
15  Beth Fowkes Tobin (University of Georgia), Learning to Craft

Select Bibliography
Index

From the University of Virginia Press:

Miriam Jacobson and Julie Park, eds., Organic Supplements: Bodies and Things of the Natural World, 1580–1790 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020), 296 pages, ISBN 978-0813944937 (hardback) / ISBN 978-0813944944 (paperback) / ISBN 978-0813944951 (Ebook), $35.

From the hair of a famous dead poet to botanical ornaments and meat pies, the subjects of this book are dynamic, organic artifacts. A cross-disciplinary collection of essays, Organic Supplements examines the interlaced relationships between natural things and human beings in early modern and eighteenth-century Europe. The material qualities of things as living organisms–and things that originate from living organisms– enabled a range of critical actions and experiences to take place for the people who wore, used, consumed, or perceived them.

Miriam Jacobson is Associate Professor of English at the University of Georgia and author of Barbarous Antiquity: Reorienting the Past in the Poetry of Early Modern England.

Julie Park is Assistant Curator and Faculty Fellow at the Special Collections Center of Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, New York University, and author of The Self and It: Novel Objects in Eighteenth-Century England.

C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Process and Connection

Part 1. Inscription and Incorporation
• Julie Park, Feather, Flourish, and Flow: The Organic Technology of Early Modern Handwriting
• Rebecca Laroche, The Flower of Ointments and Early Modern Transcorporeality
• Kevin Lambert, The Paris Opéra as a Vibrating Body: Feeling Pygmalion’s Kiss

Part II. Interface and Merger
• Jessica Wolfe, Gorgonick Spirits: Myth, Figuration, and Mineral Vivency in the Writings of Thomas Browne
• Lynn Festa, Things with Kid Gloves
• Miriam Jacobson, Vegetable Loves: Botanical Enthrallment in Early Modern Poetry

Part III. Vitality and Decay
• Michael Yonan, Knowing the World through Rococo Ornamental Prints
• Diane Purkiss, Fingers in the Pie: Baked Meats, Adultery, and Adulteration
• Jayne Lewis, Milton’s Hair
• Julia Reinhard Lupton, Afterword: Virtuous Properties of the Organic Supplement

Notes on Contributors
Index

From The University of Chicago Press:

Zachary Dorner, Merchants of Medicines: The Commerce and Coercion of Health in Britain’s Long Eighteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 280 pages, ISBN: 978-0226706801, $50.

The period from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century—the so-called long eighteenth century of English history—was a time of profound global change, marked by the expansion of intercontinental empires, long-distance trade, and human enslavement. It was also the moment when medicines, previously produced locally and in small batches, became global products. As greater numbers of British subjects struggled to survive overseas, more medicines than ever were manufactured and exported to help them. Most historical accounts, however, obscure the medicine trade’s dependence on slave labor, plantation agriculture, and colonial warfare.

In Merchants of Medicines, Zachary Dorner follows the earliest industrial pharmaceuticals from their manufacture in the United Kingdom, across trade routes, and to the edges of empire, telling a story of what medicines were, what they did, and what they meant. He brings to life business, medical, and government records to evoke a vibrant early modern world of London laboratories, Caribbean estates, South Asian factories, New England timber camps, and ships at sea. In these settings, medicines were produced, distributed, and consumed in new ways to help confront challenges of distance, labor, and authority in colonial territories. Merchants of Medicines offers a new history of economic and medical development across early America, Britain, and South Asia, revealing the unsettlingly close ties among medicine, finance, warfare, and slavery that changed people’s expectations of their health and their bodies.

Zachary Dorner is the Patrick Henry Postdoctoral Fellow in history at Johns Hopkins University.

C O N T E N T S

List of Figures and Tables

Introduction
1  Toward an Industry
2  Distance’s Remedies
3  The Possibility of Unfree Markets
4  Pine Trees and Profits
5  Self-Sufficiency in a Bottle
Conclusion

Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index

From Brill, this book by Kristen Chiem (now, incidentally, Kristen Brennan). . .

Kristen Loring Chiem, Hua Yan (1682–1756) and the Making of the Artist in Early Modern China (Leiden, Brill, 2020), 224 pages, ISBN: 978-9004427631, €110 / $132.

Hua Yan (1682–1756) and the Making of the Artist in Early Modern China explores the relationships between the artist, local society, and artistic practice during the Qing dynasty (1644–1911). Arranged as an investigation of the artist Hua Yan’s work at a pivotal moment in eighteenth-century society, this book considers his paintings and poetry in early eighteenth-century Hangzhou, mid-eighteenth-century Yangzhou, and finally their nineteenth-century afterlife in Shanghai. By investigating Hua Yan’s struggle as a marginalized artist—both at his time and in the canon of Chinese art—this study draws attention to the implications of seeing and being seen as an artist in early modern China.

Kristen Loring Chiem, Ph.D. (2011), University of California, Los Angeles, is Associate Professor of Art History at Pepperdine University. Her work explores the intersections of gender, painting, and garden imagery in Chinese art.

C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgments

Introduction
The Mountain Man of Xinluo
Lyricism in Words and Images
Painting the Garden from Life
Picturing People, Past and Present
The Xinluo School
Epilogue: Lives of Jiangnan Artists, 1700–1900

Bibliography
Index

From Oxford UP:

Jean Baker, Building America: The Life of Benjamin Henry Latrobe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 304 pages, ISBN: 978-0190696450, $35.

Building America: The Life of Benjamin Henry Latrobe is a biography of America’s first professionally trained architect and engineer. Born in 1764, Latrobe was raised in Moravian communities in England and Germany. His parents expected him to follow his father and brother into the ministry, but he rebelled against the church. Moved to London, he studied architecture and engineering. In 1795 he emigrated to the United States and became part of the period’s Transatlantic Exchange. Latrobe soon was famous for his neoclassical architecture, designing important buildings, including the US Capitol and Baltimore Basilica as well as private homes. Carpenters and millwrights who built structures more cheaply and less permanently than Latrobe challenged his efforts to establish architecture as a profession. Rarely during his twenty-five years in the United States was he financially secure, and when he was, he speculated on risky ventures that lost money. He declared bankruptcy in 1817 and moved to New Orleans, the sixth American city that he lived in, hoping to recoup his finances by installing a municipal water system. He died there of yellow fever in 1820. The themes that emerge in this biography are the critical role Latrobe played in the culture of the early republic through his buildings and his genius in neoclassical design. Like the nation’s political founders, Latrobe was committed to creating an exceptional nation, expressed in his case by buildings and internal improvements. Additionally, given the extensive primary sources available for this biography, an examination of his life reveals early American attitudes toward class, family, and religion.

Jean H. Baker is Bennett-Harwood Professor of History Emerita at Goucher College. An eminent political historian and biographer, she is the author of Margaret Sanger: A Life of Passion, Sisters: The Lives of America’s Suffragists, James Buchanan, and Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography, among other titles.

C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgments

Introduction
1  Itching Ears
2  This New American
3  Capital Projects
4  Beloved Mary and the Little Folks
5  Breaking Points
6  Final Beginnings
Conclusion

Notes
Index

From UP of Kansas:

Nathaniel Green, The Man of the People: Political Dissent and the Making of the American Presidency (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas: 2020), 408 pages, ISBN: 978-0700629954, $50.

Donald Trump’s election has forced the United States to reckon with not only the political power of the presidency, but also how he and his supporters have used the office to advance their shared vision of America: one that is avowedly nationalist, and unrepentantly rooted in nativism and white supremacy. It might be easy to attribute this dark vision, and the presidency’s immense power to reflect and reinforce it, to the singular character of one particular president—but to do so, this book tells us, would be to ignore the critical role the American public played in making the president ‘the man of the people’ in the nation’s earliest decades.

Beginning with the public debate over whether to ratify the Constitution in 1787 and concluding with Andrew Jackson’s own contentious presidency, Nathaniel Green traces the origins of our conception of the president as the ultimate American: the exemplar of our collective national values, morals, and ‘character’. The public divisiveness over the presidency in these earliest years, he contends, forged the office into an incomparable symbol of an emerging American nationalism that cast white Americans as dissenters—lovers of liberty who were willing to mobilize against tyranny in all its forms, from foreign governments to black ‘enemies’ and Indian ‘savages’—even as it fomented partisan division that belied the promise of unity the presidency symbolized. With testimony from private letters, diaries, newspapers, and bills, Green documents the shaping of the disturbingly nationalistic vision that has given the presidency its symbolic power.

This argument is about a different time than our own. And yet it shows how this time, so often revered as a mythic ‘founding era’ from which America has precipitously declined, was in fact the birthplace of the president-centered nationalism that still defines the contours of politics to this day. The lessons of The Man of the People contextualize the political turmoil surrounding the presidency today. Never in modern US history have those lessons been more badly needed.

Nathaniel C. Green is professor of history at Northern Virginia Community College.

From UNC Press:

Mark Boonshoft, Aristocratic Education and the Making of the American Republic (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2020), 296 pages, ISBN: 978-1-469659541 (ebook), $23 / ISBN: 978-1469661360 (paperback), $30 / ISBN: 978-1469659534 (hardcover), $95.

Following the American Revolution, it was a cliché that the new republic’s future depended on widespread, informed citizenship. However, instead of immediately creating the common schools–accessible, elementary education—that seemed necessary to create such a citizenry, the Federalists in power founded one of the most ubiquitous but forgotten institutions of early American life: academies, privately run but state-chartered secondary schools that offered European-style education primarily for elites. By 1800, academies had become the most widely incorporated institutions besides churches and transportation projects in nearly every state.

In this book, Mark Boonshoft shows how many Americans saw the academy as a caricature of aristocratic European education and how their political reaction against the academy led to a first era of school reform in the United States, helping transform education from a tool of elite privilege into a key component of self-government. And yet the very anti-aristocratic critique that propelled democratic education was conspicuously silent on the persistence of racial and gender inequality in public schooling. By tracing the history of academies in the revolutionary era, Boonshoft offers a new understanding of political power and the origins of public education and segregation in the United States.

Mark Boonshoft is assistant professor of history at Duquesne University.

C O N T E N T S

List of Figure and Tables
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Why Academies?: Aristocratic Education in Revolutionary America

Part I. From Denominational Schools to Nationalist Institutions, 1730–1787
1  The Emergence of Academies: The Great Awakening and Colonial Elite Formation
2  The Academy Effect: Civic Education and the American Revolution
3  Rebuilding Academies: Education and Politics in the Confederation Era

Part II. The Culture of Academies, 1780–1800
4  Defining Merit: Academies and Inequality
5  Diplomacy and Dance: The Geopolitics of Ornamental Education

Part III. From Aristocratic Education to Reform, 1787–1830
6  Creating Consensus: The Politics of State Support for Academies
7  The First Era of School Reform: War, Panic, and Popular Education

Epilogue: The Legacy of Aristocratic Education

Appendix
Notes
Bibliography