Enfilade

From Lund Humphries:

Edward McParland, The Language of Architectural Classicism: From Looking to Seeing (London: Lund Humphries Publishers, 2025), 288 pages, ISBN: 978-1848226593, £35 / $70.

Classicism is ubiquitous, from the facade of Selfridges to the letterhead of The Times, to the pedimented porches of neo-Georgian housing estates. This book invites readers to discover in their surroundings a rich language of form which is there to be revealed. It discusses the pleasures and problems of post-medieval architectural classicism, both its rigour and flexibility, its perfections and incompleteness, its continuities and innovations, and its expressiveness—from the camp to the sublime, and from originality to plagiarism. Abandoning conventional chronological, biographical, or stylistic arrangements, the book makes connections between familiar art historical periods, focusing on looking closely at the buildings and their details, from which useful generalisations emerge.

The book discusses how Renaissance architects, when faced with the bewildering variety of classical antiquity, produced canonical versions of the orders and thus a systematic method of designing in the antique manner. It asks how the highly regulated language of classicism can sustain the originality of a Michelangelo, a Soane or a John Simpson and looks at the human body in relation to classical architecture. It examines the various treatments of the wall and of lettering on classical buildings, before concluding with a chapter on architectural backgrounds in Quattrocento art, revealing how this can lead to a different kind of looking at painting and sculpture.

Edward McParland is an Irish architectural historian and author of several books, including James Gandon (1985) and Public Art in Ireland, 1680–1760 (2001). He was elected as Pro-Chancellor of University of Dublin, Trinity College in 2013. McParland is the co-founder of the Irish Architectural Archive which was established in 1976, and he has contributed extensively to architectural conservation in Ireland.

c o n t e n t s

Introduction
1  The Canon
2  Imitation
3  Body and Building
4  The Wall
5  Discord
6  Lettering
7  Architectural Backgrounds, Mostly Quattrocento
Conclusion

Select Bibliography
Index

From Johns Hopkins UP:

Eran Zelnik, American Laughter, American Fury: Humor and the Making of a White Man’s Democracy, 1750–1850 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025), 352 pages, ISBN: ‎978-1421450605, $65.

A joke is never just a joke―not even in the eighteenth century. In American Laughter, American Fury, Eran A. Zelnik offers a cultural history of early America that shows how humor among white men served to define and construct not only whiteness and masculinity but also American political culture and democracy more generally. Zelnik traces the emerging bonds of affinity that white male settlers in North America cultivated through their shared, transformative experience of mirth. This humor―a category that includes not only jokes but also play, riot, revelry, and mimicry―shaped the democratic and anti-elitist sensibilities of Americans. It also defined the borders of who could participate in politics, notably excluding those who were not white men. While this anti-authoritarian humor transformed the early United States into a country that abhorred elitism and class hierarchies, ultimately the story is one of democratization gone awry: this same humor allowed white men to draw the borders of the new nation exclusively around themselves. Zelnik analyzes several distinct forms of humor to make his case: tall tales, ‘Indian play’, Black dialect, riot and revelry, revolutionary protests, and blackface minstrelsy. This provocative study seeks to understand the vexing, contradictory interplay among humor, democracy, and violence at the heart of American history and culture that continues today.

Eran A. Zelnik is a lecturer in the Department of History at California State University, Chico.

c o n t e n t s

Introduction

Part I | Yankees and Gentlemen
1  The Joyous Multitude: Humor and the Premodern Crowd in the Revolutionary Era
2  The Witty Few: Augustan Humor and the Politics of Exclusion

Part II | From Backcountry to Frontier
3  Laughter in the Wilderness: Transgression and Mirth in Rural America
4  The Laughter and the Fury: Terror and Masquerade on the American Frontier
5  Alligator-Horses: The Frontier Jester and the Origins of Manifest Destiny

Part III | A Tale of Two Clowns
6  A Black Clown for a White Nation: The Origins and Context of Blackface Minstrelsy
7  American Folks: Black and White Jesters in Antebelluum Popular Culture

Epilogue: Laughter and Fury from the Klan to January 6, 2021

Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

Coming in April, from Penn Press:

Peter Conn, Thomas Sully’s Philadelphians: Painting the Athens of America (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society Press, 2025), 216 pages, ISBN: 978-1606180495, $40. Also available as an ebook.

Philadelphia’s early national history represented in Thomas Sully’s portraits

Thomas Sully (1783–1872) is widely regarded as perhaps the most important portrait painter of the antebellum years. Using those portraits, Thomas Sully’s Philadelphians: Painting the Athens of America reconstructs many of the people, institutions, and events that combined to make Philadelphia—from the Revolution until the 1840s—at once the most cosmopolitan and most racially embattled city in America. The book approaches Sully’s portraits as visual documents in the history of Philadelphia in the first half of the nineteenth century. Gathered here under headings that include individuals, institutions, professions, and contemporary events, Sully’s portraits offer points of entry into much that was going on in early nineteenth-century Philadelphia. Peter Conn explores education, politics, theater, medicine, journalism, commerce, philanthropy, religion, and the fierce debate over slavery. Drawing upon wide research, including previously unpublished archival material, Thomas Sully’s Philadelphians brings to vivid life the men and women who were making the history of early national Philadelphia.

Peter Conn retired from the University of Pennsylvania as Vartan Gregorian Professor of English and Professor of Education and was a member of the graduate groups in the history of art and American civilization. His publications include The Divided Mind: Ideology and Imagination in America, 1898–1917 and Literature in America. Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book. The American 1930s: A Literary History was published in 2009. Conn wrote and presented a video course on American Best Sellers for the Teaching Company. He has given talks at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Whitney Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and other institutions, on a number of American artists, including Edward Hopper, William Christenberry, Thomas Wilmer Dewing, Maxfield Parrish, Charles Sheeler, Winslow Homer, Wharton Esherick, and The Eight.

c o n t e n t s

1  Introduction

2  A Brief Biography

3  Pennsylvania Hospital
• Samuel Coates
• Benjamin Rush

4  The Second Bank of the United States
• Nicholas Biddle

5  The Theater
• George Frederick Cooke
• Fanny Kemble
• Charlotte Cushman

6  The Library Company of Philadelphia
• Zachariah Poulson

7  The Jews of Philadelphia
• Rebecca Gratz

8  The American Philosophical Society
• John Vaughan
• Peter Stephen Du Ponceau

9  Lafayette Returns to Philadelphia

10  The Historical Society of Pennsylvania
• William Rawle

11  Natural History
• William Wagner
• William Maclure

12  The University of Pennsylvania
• John Andrews

13  The Debate over Slavery
• William Henry Furness
• Benjamin Coates
• Daniel Bashiel Warner and Edward Roye

14  Epilogue: Thomas Sully and His Critics
• Jonathan Williams
• George Mifflin Dallas

Bibliography
Index

I’m a big fan of Anderson’s Seeds of America Trilogy (Chains, Forge, and Ashes) and Fever, 1793. Her latest is set to be published April 1, from Simon and Schuster. –CH

Laurie Halse Anderson, Rebellion 1776 (New York: Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books, 2025), 416 pages, ISBN: 978-1416968269, $19.

From New York Times bestselling author Laurie Halse Anderson comes a “thoroughly researched, emotionally resonant” (Booklist, starred review) historical fiction middle grade adventure about a girl struggling to survive amid a smallpox epidemic, the public’s fear of inoculation, and the seething Revolutionary War.

In the spring of 1776, thirteen-year-old Elsbeth Culpepper wakes to the sound of cannons. It’s the Siege of Boston, the Patriots’ massive drive to push the Loyalists out that turns the city into a chaotic war zone. Elsbeth’s father—her only living relative—has gone missing, leaving her alone and adrift in a broken town while desperately seeking employment to avoid the orphanage. Just when things couldn’t feel worse, the smallpox epidemic sweeps across Boston. Now, Bostonians must fight for their lives against an invisible enemy in addition to the visible one. While a treatment is being frantically fine-tuned, thousands of people rush in from the countryside begging for inoculation. At the same time, others refuse protection, for the treatment is crude at best and at times more dangerous than the disease itself. Elsbeth, who had smallpox as a small child and is now immune, finds work taking care of a large, wealthy family with discord of their own as they await a turn at inoculation, but as the epidemic and the revolution rage on, will she find her father?

Laurie Halse Anderson is a New York Times bestselling author known for tackling tough subjects with humor and sensitivity. She’s twice been a National Book Award finalist, for Chains and Speak; Chains also received the 2009 Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction. Laurie was chosen for the 2009 Margaret A. Edwards Award and received the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award in 2023, presented to her by the Crown Princess of Sweden.

From Bodleian Library Publishing, with distribution by The University of Chicago Press:

Mark Carnall, Beautiful Shells: George Perry’s Conchology (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2025), 192 pages, ISBN: 978-1851246168, £25 / $40.

In 1811, architect, stone mason, and shell obsessive George Perry published his lavishly illustrated volume, Conchology or the Natural History of Shells. The work featured 348 beautifully illustrated mollusk shells with descriptions of species, many of which were new to science. Despite the effort that went into producing it—and at a time when conchophilia, or shell fancying, was at its height—Perry’s Conchology disappeared from scientific literature, after being suppressed by the leading conchologists of the day and then cruelly mocked for decades after. Beautiful Shells reproduces the stunning, exquisitely drawn, and sometimes fanciful shell illustrations from this extraordinary forgotten volume. Following an introduction exploring our fascination with shells and their impact on human history, culture, and science, each of the sixty-one color illustrations is included alongside a description of notable shells and what is known of the mysterious organisms that make them. From the common limpet and razor clam to the valuable cowry and spectacular divine conch, the wide range of featured shells form a treasure trove of natural beauty from our oceans and shores.

Mark Carnall is collections manager of human remains and non-insect invertebrate collections at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.

c o n t e n t s

Introduction
The Shells

Appendix
Notes
Bibliography
Picture Credits
Index

From Bodleian Library Publishing, with distribution by The University of Chicago Press:

Stephen Harris, Catesby’s Natural History (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2024), 304 pages, ISBN: ‎978-1851246397, £50 / $75.

A beautiful reproduction of naturalist Mark Catesby’s flora and fauna illustrations of North America and the Caribbean.

Mark Catesby was an eighteenth-century naturalist and artist whose work on the natural history of North America and the Caribbean still resonates today. During several perilous trips, Catesby collected specimens and made extensive observations in the field, gathering material that would eventually become The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands, which featured 220 elaborate, distinctive hand-colored illustrations.

With their striking combinations of animals and plants paired together with the first-hand observations he made, Catesby’s stunning illustrations were widely appreciated in their time and catalyzed interest in the natural history of Colonial America. Ultimately, his work was established as a key reference for the scientific understanding of natural history. As an artist, Catesby meticulously recorded the environment, sifting fact from fiction about the lives of the plants and animals he observed. As a collector, he introduced many living plants to Britain, thereby changing European gardens forever. Catesby’s Natural History reproduces all the original plates and shows how Catesby’s practical field experience shaped his work in all areas. Whether through the now-extinct species he recorded or the cultural changes he witnessed, his research continues to be relevant, demonstrating the vulnerability and fragility of the natural world.

Stephen A. Harris is Druce Curator of Oxford University Herbaria.

c o n t e n t s

1  Natural History in the Thirteen Colonies
2  Who was Mark Catesby?
3  On Habitats and Uses
4  On Indigenous and Enslaved Peoples
5  On Collection and Cultivation
6  On Illustrations
7  On Publishing the Natural History
8  Legacy

From Princeton UP:

Jennifer Ngaire Heuer, The Soldier’s Reward: Love and War in the Age of the French Revolution and Napoleon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025), 384 pages, ISBN: 978-0691262574, £38 / $45.

A sweeping history of intimacy and family life in France during the age of revolution

The French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars devastated Europe for nearly a quarter of a century. The Soldier’s Reward recovers the stories of soldiers and their relationships to family and domestic life during this period, revealing how prolonged warfare transformed family and gender dynamics and gave rise to new kinds of citizenship.

In this groundbreaking work combining social, cultural, gender, and military history, Jennifer Ngaire Heuer vividly describes how men fought for years with only fleeting moments of peace. Combatants were promised promotion, financial gain, and patriotic glory. They were also rewarded for their service by being allowed to return home to waiting families and love interests, and with marriages that were arranged and financially supported by the state. Heuer explores competing ideas of masculinity in France, as well as the experiences of the men and women who participated in such marriages. She argues that we cannot fully understand the changing nature of war and peace in this period without considering the important roles played by family, gender, and romantic entanglements. Casting new light on a turbulent era of mass mobilization and seemingly endless conflict, The Soldier’s Reward shows how, from the Revolution through the Restoration, war, intimacy, and citizenship intersected in France in new and unexpected ways.

Jennifer Ngaire Heuer is professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the author of The Family and the Nation: Gender and Citizenship in Revolutionary France, 1789–1830 and the editor (with Mette Harder) of Life in Revolutionary France.