The University Press of New England

Brown, Ann Eckert

A generously illustrated survey of an important post-revolutionary American decorative art form.

For today’s owner of an antique house, the discovery of an early stenciled wall—even a fragment of one—is a revelation that offers a shard of a tangible past. In post-revolutionary America, the decoration of choice for a surprisingly large number of home owners from all social and economic groups was walls painted with intricate stenciled designs. Stenciled walls were cheaper and more sanitary than those covered with paper, but the most compelling reason for the widespread use of stenciling was that it was considered far more stylish than impersonal, mass-produced paper. Stencil artists freely borrowed wallpaper motifs and crossbred them. Successive generations of wallpaper, which became increasingly more affordable after the Industrial Revolution, covered stenciled walls, hiding them, obliterating some and preserving others.

Ann Eckert Brown’s extensive research has unearthed stencils not just in New England’s more characteristic homes, taverns, and inns, but also in the south and midwest. She divides stenciling into rural-based folk art, which uses naturalistic, and sometimes primitive motifs, and classically inspired, urban-based stencils, which feature patterns more refined in scale and earlier in execution, echoing Federal style images.

Over 250 illustrations complement Brown’s text as she makes fresh stylistic connections among designs, artists, regions, and houses over two centuries, discovering and illuminating some missing links in the history of wall stenciling. Even more, she ties together the shared destinies of the families, descendants, artists, rescuers, and restorers who lived with, created, or have dedicated their lives to preserving, this beautiful art form. She also provides a glossary, a discussion of early paint materials, suggested resources for wall stenciling preservation, and a Who’s Who of American wall stenciling which includes 18th, 19th, and 20th century artists and preservationists. The result, as Mimi Handler writes in her foreword, “is a book that fairly hums with life and purpose.”

"Brown gives us a genealogy of design relationships and similarities in shapes--leaves, festoons, flowers, and fans—as well as the more abstract record of their juxtapositions, density, size, and spacing. Her absolute familiarity with the myriad variations of folk and classical designs as well as their migrations, her ability to place them in context, is a great advantage to those of us who are glad to know about what remains of these bright, lively images from the quickly receding American past.”
—Mimi Handler, former editor of Early American Life

“I feel that the book is outstanding in revealing the geographical area of stenciling evidence as well as the historical evidence for the houses. What a wonderful source for a recapitulation of early published evidence as well as revealing the unknown through exhaustive field and archival research. Now this is in one book. My hat is off to her for her drive to finish such a daunting task. What a source for future field workers as well as those interested in vanishing designs from crumbling walls. I wish she were on my team of researchers. “
—Bradford L. Rauschenberg, Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts

“There has been no comprehensive examination of American stenciled wall decoration since Nina Fletcher Little's American Decorative Wall Painting1700-1850, first published in 1952. Ann Brown's painstaking research significantly expands public access to this important American art form through copious illustrations of private and public buildings. Her regional consideration of methods, materials, and artists provides a much needed reference. “
—Stacy C. Hollander, Senior Curator/Director of Exhibitions, American Folk Art Museum

“American stenciling 1790-1840 has now been studied and recorded for three-quarters of a century. By following in the footsteps of Edward Allen (1926), Janet Waring (1937), Nina Fletcher Little (1952) and others, Ann Eckert Brown has extended our understanding of this colourful theme through recent discoveries and by the reach of her north American research which runs well beyond the Eastern seaboard. Indeed this compenium approaches the comprehensive nature of a catalogue raisonée. The book is organized for reference with a hands-on understanding of its subject. By assembling the material historically, stylistically and geographically, the author has demonstrated that much of this was carried out well beyond the founding thirteen states and up into Canada. As an art form it was particularly celebrated in the post-Colonial antebellum decades. The westward migration of many stenciling schemes is manifest in the designs and explained by the itinerant lives of many of the practitioners involved. This book and the work it both chronicles and illustrates is truly an image of a new nation.”
—James Ayres, Bath, England

Ann Eckert Brown has been researching, executing, and teaching 18th and 19th century decorative painting techniques since the 1960s. Included in her restoration commissions is the painted interior of a Gothic Revival chapel in Newport, Rhode Island. Her ornamented furnishings have been widely exhibited, including two solo exhibitions in the 1990s. Her work has appeared in Yankee and Early American Life, which named her a craftsman of the year in 1993. She has presented numerous programs on American wall stenciling, including those at Old Sturbridge Village, Massachusetts and the The Farmers’ Museum in Cooperstown, New York.

University Press of New England
224 pp. 250 illus. (150 color). 8 1/2 x 11"
Decorative Arts & Material Culture

$60.00 Cloth, 1-58465-194-6

James E. Mooney

 This book reproduces each page of the printed catalogues of the Yale College Library issued in 1743,
 1755, and 1791, accompanied by an index that identifies authors and titles and is keyed to these
 facsimile pages. The introduction tells the story of the early books of that library from long before
 there was a Yale College in which to place them. It examines the legend of the “Forty Folios” and
 describes the major early gifts from Jeremiah Dummer, Elihu Yale, George Berkeley, and others that
 made it possible for the new college to build its collection without spending a cent for books. The
 use of the books during the 18th century is described and a comparison is made with similar
 catalogues of Harvard College. There is a list of selected sources used for this introduction as a guide
 for further study.

$25.00 Paper, 0-8457-3139-4

224 pp. 5 1/2 x 9"

John Marciari

$25.00 Paper, 0-8457-3133-5 176 pp. 6 x 9"

University Press of New England

The third offering in the Winterthur Decorative Arts Series (which also includes Evaluating
Your Collection and The Winterthur Guide to Caring for Your Collection), The
Winterthur Guide to Recognizing Styles serves as an invaluable guide to identifying styles in
the decorative arts.

 What distinguishes Queen Anne furniture from William and Mary? Not sure if your candlestick
 is Federal or Empire? What does Chippendale-style creamware look like? Illustrated in full
 color with objects from Winterthur’s outstanding collection, this book answers these questions
 and more. Covering the years 1640 to 1860, it provides a road map for recognizing the defining
 characteristics of each period and understanding how styles have developed and changed over
 the years.

 $17.95, paperback, ISBN 0-912724-51-X

 Winterthur Decorative Arts Series
 Distributed for Winterthur

 150 pp. 74 color illus. 6 5/8 x 9 1/2"
 Material Culture
 November 2001

University Press of New England

 Lively and ambitious, the definitive resource guide

 With over 200 illustrations and five essays based entirely on Library of Congress materials,
 American Women exemplifies the multicultural, interdisciplinary approach to American
 women’s history and culture that the Library’s phenomenal collections provide. Starting with
 chapters on general and rare books, newspapers, periodicals, and legal collections, and moving
 on to special-format materials such as manuscripts, prints and photographs, maps, music,
 recorded sound, motion pictures and television, American folklife, and foreign-language
 collections, this new guide is designed to help researchers plan a research strategy before they
 ever visit the Library of Congress.

 Used in conjunction with the Library’s online catalogs and digitized collections, it should inspire
 historians, biographers, picture researchers, film and documentary makers, and others
 dedicated to uncovering and telling women’s stories. For example, as a result of the copyright
 laws, for a century and a half the Library has been the recipient of bottomless resources for
 studying representations of women in popular culture, from graphic materials of all kinds to
 literary works, film, comic books, and more. As for manuscripts, the traditional underpinnings of
 history, the Library has for many years quietly collected the papers of many important women,
 from leaders of reform movements, to the two current women Supreme Court justices, to
 scientists, writers, and artists.

 Senior editor Sheridan Harvey is the women’s studies specialist at the Library of Congress.

 $35.00, cloth, ISBN 0-8444-1048-9

 Distributed for the Library of Congress

 500 pp. 200 illus. (100 color). 8 1/2 x 11"
 Women’s Studies / American History / Reference
 October 2001

James L. Garvin

The first and only full-scale technical and stylistic analysis of 200 years of
architectural evolution in northern New England.

This is a book about understanding old buildings. In an era in which much of the
US landscape has been littered by unimaginative, prefabricated structures, James
L. Garvin tells owners and would-be owners of old buildings in Maine, New
Hampshire, and Vermont what they need to know before they begin the
restoration process.

In wonderfully lucid prose, Garvin describes the production of the materials
from which the buildings of northern New England were built, outlines the
stylistic evolution of the region’s structures from the early 1700s to World War
II, and offers guidelines for dating old buildings. Focusing on domestic
architecture, but including examples of public, commercial, religious, and
industrial buildings, he offers custodians of buildings an understanding of the
technologies embodied in these structures, answers questions about stylistic
changes, and allows the architecture of northern New England to be understood for the first time with a technical depth
that is already available for buildings in better-studied parts of the US.

Written for both homeowners and those responsible for public and museum structures, this volume provides an
understanding of the region’s building history even as it specifically answers questions that most often perplex
architects and preservationists. By offering all custodians of northern New England buildings a richer understanding of
architectural style and structure, the book encourages the use of appropriate methods and materials in building
conservation and rehabilitation. Generously illustrated throughout, the book is also an essential resource for anyone
who is interested in American and New England architecture and the building trades, and for anyone who has ever
wondered about the secrets and stories of old buildings.

From the book—

“Whether you love or merely tolerate your old house, it is well to approach the building with one truth
firmly in mind. Human life is short. The life of a house is potentially limitless. Even in the youthful
US, we have houses that have been sheltering families for three hundred years or more. Barring disaster
or imprudent neglect, your house is destined to outlive you. You are but one in a long line of
custodians of the property—a line that extends backward through the decades or centuries and forward
to an indefinite future . . .

“That being the case, let the changes you make to your property be additive rather than subtractive in
nature. If you need a new kitchen or bathroom or furnace, install it. But wherever possible, install it in
such a way as to preserve original features or fabric . . . Try to make your work add to the legacy of
the past so that you can pass a dwelling of even greater value and comfort to the future. Remember
that the number of old houses is finite, and diminishes each year. It is a privilege and responsiblity to
own a piece of the past.”

James L. Garvin has served as the State Architectural Historian, New Hampshire Division of Historical Resources,
since 1987. His familiarity with the region’s buildings derives from over 20 years of curatorship, from writing or editing
almost 200 National Register nominations, and from preparing over 150 reports on historic buildings. He has
supervised the restoration of several 18th-century structures.

$35.00, cloth, ISBN 1-58465-095-8

208 pp. 150 illus. 45 figs. 8 1/2 x 11"
New England / Architecture
June 2001

Written and illustrated by Howard S. Andros

A charming and indispensable guide to the major buildings in Boston built from 1630
to 1850.

This is a book for Boston visitors interested in the architecture and character of the
pre-modern era, as well as for armchair historians desiring a quick but fascinating
version of the first two centuries of Boston history. Divided into four
periods—Colonial, Provincial, Federal, and Greek Revival—the book presents 57
buildings extant in the 1960s.

For each building, in addition to a concise verbal description of its history and
function, Howard S. Andros supplies a detailed drawing conveying its character and
its form. Maps of downtown Boston and the greater Boston area pinpoint each site’s
location. The remains of a vibrant older city, increasingly hidden amid today’s
massive urban reconstruction projects, come alive again in The Buildings of Old
Boston.

Howard S. Andros has been an illustrator, graphic artist, and map designer for 60 years.

$12.95, paperback, ISBN 1-58465-092-3

192 pp. 74 drawings. 6 maps. 5 1/2 x 8 1/2"
Boston Travel / Boston History / Architecture
May 2001

Richard Archer

A comprehensive examination of the diversity and unity of New England life in the 17th century.

The ambitious goal of this book is to provide a new portrait of the social life and social structure of 17th-century New
England. The resulting synthesis dismantles conventional presentations of a homogenous, Puritan New England in favor of one emphasizing difference, divergence, and even conflict over values and behavior. Richard Archer investigates the political history of power, the intellectual history of religious beliefs, the social history of the family, the economic
history of systems of exchange, ethnic history, and environmental history to display the many “fissures” that rent New
England society from the very outset.

While he stresses the complexity of New England beliefs, economics, family life, and town and political life, he also
makes clear how the larger society—far more complex and complicated than traditionally portrayed—nevertheless
coalesced as a functioning social order. Chapters on Indians, religion, social structure, family life, deviant behavior, the
economy, and towns demonstrate that diversity and a common culture did in fact coexist.

Richard Archer is Professor of History at Whittier College.

$19.95, paperback, ISBN 1-58465-085-0
$50.00, cloth, ISBN 1-58465-084-2

Revisiting New England
University of New Hampshire / University Press of New England

248 pp. 2 maps. 6 x 9"
New England History
June 2001

Stephen Carl Arch

An analysis of the foundations of autobiography in America.

Although much has been written about Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, other writers of what Stephen Arch calls
“self-biographies” in post-revolutionary America have received scant attention from scholars. Yet this rich variety of
texts dramatically demonstrates the complex nature of the emergence of 19th-century concepts of identity.

Arguing persuasively that “autobiography” must be construed as a modern invention, Arch shows how that genre
haphazardly and tentatively emerged in the early 19th century in the very personal and often idiosyncratic
self-biographies of seven authors. These include three narratives reflecting older, conservative notions of selfhood
(Alexander Graydon, Benjamin Rush, and Ethan Allen) and four that explore newer, more progressive, and even radical
conceptions of the self (K. White, Elizabeth Fisher, Stephen Burroughs, and John Fitch).

Showing the evolution of a concept as elastic and ephemeral as “the self” is no easy task, but Arch, equally adept as
literary critic and historian, offers a unique and imaginative study of the emergence of a specifically American, and
specifically modern, identity.

“Clearly written and persuasive, this significant book sheds light on the contested nature of the
emergence of 19th-century concepts of identity and will help to shape the growing field of literary
studies of this era. Timely and necessary, After Franklin raises crucial issues about the formation of
American selves.”—Brigitte Bailey, University of New Hampshire

Stephen Carl Arch, Associate Professor of English at Michigan State University, is author of Authorizing the Past:
The Rhetoric of History in Seventeenth-Century New England (1994) and numerous articles on early American
literature and culture.

$24.95, paperback, ISBN 1-58465-132-6
$60.00, cloth, ISBN 1-58465-114-8

288 pp. 2 illus. 6 x 9"

July 2001

Donald L. Fennimore

This small but lavishly illustrated catalogue is the first in-depth study ever on silver bird-decorated spoons. Author
Donald L. Fennimore, Winterthur’s senior curator of metals, narrates the fascinating social, technical, and artistic tale of American silver spoons whose bowls were struck with bird images: from the dove and olive branch to the bald eagle. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, these rare and highly collectible objects of true beauty proved to be a significant vehicle for expressing not only creativity but also a new national identity.

Fennimore’s lucid and well-researched volume, which accompanies an exhibition of the same name at Winterthur,
includes a comprehensive list of East Coast silversmiths who produced these charming objects between 1750 and 1830.
Flights of Fancy surely will serve as a single point of reference for all future study of these uniquely American pieces.

$12.95, paperback, ISBN 0-912724-57-9

Distributed for Winterthur

34 pp. 33 duotones. 2 figs. 10 x 7"
Material Culture

Nina Fletcher Little

Back in Print—A classic of material culture, first published in 1980, is once more
available.

“Take a writer-speaker-researcher so widely known as Nina Fletcher Little; give her
a subject with the popularity of boxes (every collector has at least one or two, even
if they don’t actually collect the boxes). The result will be a comprehensive study
of boxes used before the Civil War in the United States . . . The volume is well
documented, representing an amalgam of scholarship and aesthetic sense. Ms. Little
does not picture the boxes as isolated relics from the past; she shows them within
the context of social conditions at the times of their uses. Virtually every sort of
box imaginable is presented in what will become a collectors’ classic.”—Southern
Antiques

“This book on boxes (and their contents) used in early American households
provides an unusual—but not quite so narrow as you might imagine—insight into
our forebears’ way of life. Careful scholarship does not prevent it from being
informative and entertaining. Grouping of boxes by type of use into four main categories, each with about eight
subcategories, is helpful for purposes of reference and general comprehension. There are 190 photographs, 24 of them
in color, and many portraying several boxes.”—Antioch Review

“Before boxes were the disposable cardboard items of today, they held a special importance for their unique crafted
quality and distinct suitability to the job they were assigned. The author examines the variety of boxes designed for
household, artistic, and recreational purposes throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Specific
descriptions of the carving, painting, and materials used for the creation of sewing, salt, paint, and snuff boxes are
highlighted by over 200 illustrations. An education and a delight for the collector of antique boxes.”—Booklist

“A copiously illustrated volume by noted decorative-arts authority Nina Fletcher Little. It not only provides a rather
thorough item survey of the more elite sorts of containers used by pre-Civil War Americans to store their material
possessions, it also attempts to a limited extent to provide a social history of boxes, their manufacture, and their use
from the 17th to mid-19th centuries. Drawing upon probate records and account books as well as the standard
decorative arts and material culture literature, Little has written a lively . . . narrative to accompany the 24 color plates
and 190 black and white illustrations of such containers as chests, desk boxes, sewing boxes, hatboxes, snuff boxes,
food cannisters, even spectacle cases and birdhouses.”—Choice

For over 60 years, NINA FLETCHER LITTLE collected and wrote voluminously about American decorative and folk
arts. Her pioneering work celebrated the beauty, diversity, and utility of American antiques, and highlighted the
historical and social contexts in which they were made, used, and preserved. Neat and Tidy was first published in 1980.
SPNEA has also reissued her books Little by Little: Six Decades of Collecting American Decorative Arts and Country
Arts in Early American Homes.

$19.95, paperback, ISBN 1-58465-137-7

Distributed for the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities

240 pp. 214 illus. (24 color). 6 1/4 x 9"
Decorative Arts / Material Culture
May 2001

Edited and introduced by Donna-Belle Garvin

A remarkable re-creation of the life and world of an 18th-century shoemaker and tanner, surveyor and clerk, trader
and farmer—profusely illustrated, for a general audience.

Samuel Lane, whose life in and around the town of Stratham, New Hampshire, spanned much of the 18th century, was
truly a “Renaissance man.” Civic, business, and personal concerns fill the pages of the diary he kept for over 60 years.
The worries, dilemmas, and day-to-day work Lane detailed provide a compelling view of life in colonial New
Hampshire. Together with his business records and family papers, Lane’s diaries form an important part of the New
Hampshire Historical Society’s collections.

Basing his narrative on careful study of this rich documentary legacy, historian Jerald E. Brown explores the life, career,
and motivations of one man and his family. In a preliminary essay, editor Donna-Belle Garvin introduces Lane’s world
to the reader. The many illustrations of leatherworking, farming, surveying, buildings, bridges, crops, animals, and
gravestones draw readers into the complex world and work that shaped Lane and his family. This fascinating tale is the
most complete account now available of the life of a colonial New England artisan and tradesman.

JERALD E. BROWN served as editor of the New Hampshire Historical Society’s Samuel Lane Papers while earning
his Doctor of Philosophy in History from University of New Hampshire. He now heads the history department at
Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore.

DONNA-BELLE GARVIN, director of research and publications at the New Hampshire Historical Society, has
written articles and co-authored books and exhibition catalogs on New Hampshire history. She edits the Society’s
journal, Historical New Hampshire.

$19.95, paperback, ISBN 1-58465-052-4
$50.00, cloth, ISBN 1-58465-051-6

304 pp. 188 illus. 22 figs. 7 x 10"
New England History / Biography
April 2000

Phillip H. Round

A major reexamination of New England's cultural society, in which Puritans share the stage with many other discourses.

In a major interdisciplinary reinterpretation of first-generation New England cultural formation, Phillip H. Round demonstrates that Puritanism was only one ingredient in the creation of a new American civil society. Examining five discourses at work in the early modern era–civic order, truth-telling, gender difference, authorship, and ethnicity–heprovides fresh readings of early American writers like William Bradford and Anne Bradstreet, and historical figures like Anne Hutchinson and Thomas Morton, that reveal the
true transatlantic and civil dimensions of our nation's earliest literature.

Though the struggle over social authority took place within a Reformed Protestant context, it was actually far more eclectic, heterogeneous, and secular than contemporary published Puritan discourses–and their latter day interpreters–would admit. Round steps outside the official Puritan discourse to emphasize several other modes of rhetorical expression: transatlantic letters, urban revolutionary discourses and performances, town records, and pamphlets and tracts that engaged questions of racial and gender
difference. The result is a version of the "New England Mind" and public culture which is far more complicated and interesting than prevailing theories suggest.

PHILLIP H. ROUND is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Iowa.

Civil Society

Tufts University
288 pp. 6 x 9"
Cloth, 0-87451-928-4. $45.00x
Paper, 0-87451-929-2. $21.00s
New England Studies

Revised Edition

Julian P. Boyd

Edited by Gerard W. Gewalt

A new edition of a consummate scholar’s book on America’s most important document.

For more than 50 years, Jefferson scholar Julian P. Boyd’s study of the evolution of the text of the Declaration of
Independence, which the Library of Congress undertook while the nation was in the throes of World War II, has remained the preeminent textual presentation of the most fundamental document of the United States. First published in 1943 and out of print for over 40 years, this new edition once again presents photographic prints of all known drafts in one large-format book. It now adds the fragment of a rough draft Boyd found in 1947. In an introductory essay, Gerard W. Gawalt relates the story behind the fragment’s discovery, and why it sheds new light on the writing of the Declaration.

A moving wartime foreword by Archibald MacLeish, Librarian of Congress in 1939—44, and Boyd’s expert insights into Jefferson’s writing and editing process, set the stage for the superlative color reproductions. Readers can examine
documents, such as the Virginia Declaration of Rights, that Jefferson drew upon in preparing the Declaration of
Independence. Moreover, the documents show that writing the Declaration was not an easy individual undertaking, but
rather that its composition involved diligent, determined cooperation by many in the midst of wartime chaos.

JULIAN P. BOYD (1903—80) was editor of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. GERARD W. GAWALT is a Library of
Congress manuscript historian and specialist on Jefferson and early American history.

Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, Inc.,
and Library of Congress
Distributed by University Press of New England

102 pp. 46 color illus. 10 x 13"
Cloth, 0-8444-0980-4. $29.95T