Enfilade

First published in 2018, Colonial Complexions has just been released in paperback; from Penn Press:

Sharon Block, Colonial Complexions: Race and Bodies in Eighteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 232 pages, ISBN 978-0812250060 (cloth), $45 / ISBN 978-0812224924 (paperback), $23.

In Colonial Complexions, historian Sharon Block examines how Anglo-Americans built racial ideologies out of descriptions of physical appearance. By analyzing more than 4,000 advertisements for fugitive servants and slaves in colonial newspapers alongside scores of transatlantic sources, she reveals how colonists transformed observable characteristics into racist reality. Building on her expertise in digital humanities, Block repurposes these well-known historical sources to newly highlight how daily language called race and identity into being before the rise of scientific racism.

In the eighteenth century, a multitude of characteristics beyond skin color factored into racial assumptions, and complexion did not have a stable or singular meaning. Colonists justified a race-based slave labor system not by opposing black and white but by accumulating differences in the bodies they described: racism was made real by marking variation from a norm on some bodies, and variation as the norm on others. Such subtle systemizations of racism naturalized enslavement into bodily description, erased Native American heritage, and privileged life history as a crucial marker of free status only for people of European-based identities. Colonial Complexions suggests alternative possibilities to modern formulations of racial identities and offers a precise historical analysis of the beliefs behind evolving notions of race-based differences in North American history.

Sharon Block is Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine.

C O N T E N T S

Introduction
1  Complicating Humors and Rethinking Complexion
2  Shaping Bodies in Print: Labor and Health
3  Coloring Bodies: Naturalized Incompatibilities
4  Categorizing Bodies: Race, Place, and the Pursuit of Freedom
5  Written by and on the Body: Racialization of Affects and Effects
Epilogue

Appendices
1  Advertisements for Runaways: Sources and Methodology
2  Graphic Overview of Advertisements for Runaways
3  Newspapers with Advertisements for Runaways, 1750–75

Notes
Index
Acknowledgments

From Penn Press:

C. Dallett Hemphill, edited by Rodney Hessinger and Daniel Richter, Philadelphia Stories: People and Their Places in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), 392 pages, ISBN 978-0812253184, $35 / £27.

For the average tourist, the history of Philadelphia can be like a leisurely carriage ride through Old City. The Liberty Bell. Independence Hall. Benjamin Franklin. The grooves in the cobblestone are so familiar, one barely notices the ride. Yet there are other paths to travel, and the ride can be bumpy. Beyond the famed founders, other Americans walked the streets of Philadelphia whose lives were, in their own ways, just as emblematic of the promises and perils of the new nation.

Philadelphia Stories chronicles twelve of these lives to explore the city’s people and places from the colonial era to the years before the Civil War. This collective portrait includes men and women, Black and white Americans, immigrants and native born. If mostly forgotten today, banker Stephen Girard was one of the wealthiest men ever to have lived, and his material legacy can be seen by visiting sites such as Girard College. In a different register, but equally impressive, were the accomplishments of Sarah Thorn Tyndale. In a few short years as a widow she made enough money on her porcelain business to retire to a life as a reformer. Others faced frustration. Take, for example, Grace Growden Galloway. Born to an important family, she saw her home invaded and her property confiscated by patriot forces. Or consider the life of Francis Johnson, a Black bandleader and composer who often performed at the Musical Fund Hall, which still stands today. And yet he was barred from joining its Society. Philadelphia Stories examines their rich lives, as well as those of others who shaped the city’s past.

Many of the places inhabited by these people survive to this day. In the pages of this book and on the streets of the city, one can visit both the people and places of Philadelphia’s rich history.

C. Dallett Hemphill (1959–2015) was Professor of History at Ursinus College. Rodney Hessinger is Professor of History at John Carroll University. Daniel K. Richter is Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History at the University of Pennsylvania.

C O N T E N T S

Foreword, Daniel Richter

Introduction: Places and People, completed by Rodney Hessinger

Part I. For the Love of God: Three Colonial Men of Faith
Prologue, Daniel Richter
1  Anthony Benezet, completed by Jean Soderlund
2  Henry Muhlenberg, completed by Lisa Minardi
3  William White, completed by Sarah Barringer Gordon

Part II. Declaring Independence: Three Revolutionary Wives
Prologue, C. Dallett Hemphill
4  Grace Growden Galloway, completed by Judith Van Buskirk
5  Anne Shippen Livingston, completed by Susan Branson
6  Deborah Norris Logan, completed by Rodney Hessinger

Part III. Striving to Succeed: Three ‘Self-Made Men’ in the New Nation
Prologue, Rodney Hessinger
7  Charles Willson Peale, completed by Nenette Luarca-Shoaf
8  Stephen Girard, completed by Brenna O’Rourke Holland
9  Joseph Hemphill, completed by Sarah Rodriguez

Part IV. Pursuing an Inclusive America: Three Aspiring Antebellum Lives
Prologue, Rodney Hessinger
10  Francis Johnson, completed by Richard Newman
11  Sarah Thorn Tyndale, completed by Susan Klepp
12  William Darrah Kelley, completed by Andrew Shankman

Notes
Index
Acknowledgments

Distributed by The University of Chicago Press:

Joseph Bagley, Boston’s Oldest Buildings and Where to Find Them (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2021), 248 pages, ISBN: ‎ 978-1684580392, $30.

As Boston approaches its four-hundredth anniversary, it is remarkable that it still maintains its historic character despite constant development. The fifty buildings featured in this book all pre-date 1800 and illustrate Boston’s early history. This is the first book to survey Boston’s fifty oldest buildings and does so through an approachable narrative which will appeal to nonarchitects and those new to historic preservation. Beginning with a map of the buildings’ locations and an overview of the historic preservation movement in Boston, the book looks at the fifty buildings in order from oldest to most ­recent. Geographically, the majority of the buildings are located within the downtown area of Boston along the Freedom Trail and within easy walking distance from the core of the city. This makes the book an ideal guide for tourists, and residents of the city will also find it interesting as it includes numerous properties in the surrounding neighborhoods. The buildings span multiple uses from homes to churches and warehouses to restaurants. Each chapter features a building, a narrative focusing on its historical significance, and the efforts made to preserve it over time. Full ­color photos and historical drawings illustrate each building and area. Boston’s Oldest Buildings and Where to Find Them presents the ideals of historic preservation in an approachable and easy­-to-­read manner appropriate for the broadest audience.

Joseph M. Bagley is the city archaeologist of Boston, a historic preservationist, and a staff member of the Boston Landmarks Commission. He has worked for multiple local and state historic preservation offices, including the Maine Historic Preservation Commission and the Massachusetts Historical Commission.

Distributed by Yale UP:

Adriano Aymonino, Enlightened Eclecticism: The Grand Design of the 1st Duke and Duchess of Northumberland (London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2021), 400 pages, ISBN: 978-1913107178, £50 / $65.

The central decades of the eighteenth century in Britain were crucial to the history of European taste and design. One of the period’s most important campaigns of patronage and collecting was that of the 1st Duke and Duchess of Northumberland: Sir Hugh Smithson (1712–1786) and Lady Elizabeth Seymour Percy (1716–1776). This book examines four houses they refurbished in eclectic architectural styles—Stanwick Hall, Northumberland House, Syon House, and Alnwick Castle—alongside the innumerable objects they collected, their funerary monuments, and their persistent engagement in Georgian London’s public sphere. Over the years, their commissions embraced or pioneered styles as varied as Palladianism, rococo, neoclassicism, and Gothic revival. Patrons of many artists and architects, they are revealed, particularly, as the greatest supporters of Robert Adam. In every instance, minute details contributed to large-scale projects expressing the Northumberlands’ various aesthetic and cultural allegiances. Their development sheds light on the eclectic taste of Georgian Britain, the emergence of neoclassicism and historicism, and the cultures of the Grand Tour and the Enlightenment.

Adriano Aymonino is senior lecturer and director of undergraduate programs, Department of History and History of Art, University of Buckingham.

From Amsterdam UP:

Dominique Bauer, Camilla Murgia, eds., Ephemeral Spectacles, Exhibition Spaces, and Museums, 1750–1918 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021), 300 pages, ISBN: 978-9463720908, €109 / $124.

This book examines ephemeral exhibitions from 1750 to 1918. In an era of acceleration and elusiveness, these transient spaces functioned as microcosms in which reality was shown, simulated, staged, imagined, experienced, and known. They therefore had a dimension of spectacle to them, as the volume demonstrates. Against this backdrop, the different chapters deal with a plethora of spaces and spatial installations: the Wunderkammer, the spectacle garden, cosmoramas and panoramas, the literary space, the temporary museum, and the alternative exhibition space.

Dominique Bauer is Assistant Professor of History at the Faculty of Architecture, University of Leuven, Belgium, and a member of the Centre d’Analyse Culturelle de la Première Modernité at the Université Catholique de Louvain. Camilla Murgia is Junior Lecturer in History of Art at the University of Lausanne.

C O N T E N T S

Camilla Murgia, Introduction: Staging the Temporary: The Fragile Character of Space

I. The Department Store
1  Amy McHugh and Cristina Vignone, ‘One Need Be Neither a Shopper Nor a Purchaser to Enjoy’: Ephemeral Exhibitions at Tiffany & Co., 1870–1905
2  Kathryn A. Haklin, Enclosed Exhibitions: Claustrophobia, Balloons, and the Department Store in Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames

II. Spectacles
3  Susan Taylor-Leduc, Jardins-Spectacles: Spaces and Traces of Embodiment
4  Camilla Murgia, Parading the Temporary: Cosmoramas, Panoramas, and Spectacles in Early Nineteenth-Century Paris
5  Juliet Simpson, Portable Museums: Imaging and Staging the ‘Northern Gothic Art Tour’ – Ephemera and Alterity

III. At the Intersection of Literature and the Built Environment
6  Dominique Bauer, The Elusiveness of History and the Ephemerality of Display in Nineteenth-Century France and Belgium: At the Intersection of the Built Environment and the Spatial Image in Literature
7  Li-hsin Hsu, The ‘Phantasmatic’ Chinatown in Helen Hunt Jackson’s ‘The Chinese Empire’ and Mark Twain’s Roughing It

IV. The Museum and Alternative Exhibition Spaces
8  Stefanie Jovanovic-Kruspel, ‘Show Meets Science’: How Hagenbeck’s ‘Human Zoos’ Inspired Ethnographic Science and Its Museum Presentation
9  Emanuele Pellegrini, The Last Wunderkammer: Curiosities in Private Collections between the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
10  Nirmalie Alexandra Mulloli, The Impact of Alternative Exhibition Spaces on European Modern Art before World War I

Index