Enfilade

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