Mastered by the Clock is the first work to explore the evolution of clock-based time consciousness in the American South. Challenging traditional assumptions about the plantation economy's reliance on a premodern, nature-based conception of time, Mark M. Smith shows how and why southerners--particularly masters and their slaves--came to view the clock as a legitimate arbiter of time. Drawing on an extraordinary range of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century archival sources, Smith demonstrates that white southern slaveholders began to incorporate this new sense of time in the 1830s. Influenced by colonial merchants' fascination with time thrift, by a long-held familiarity with urban, public time, by the transport and market revolution in the South, and by their own qualified embrace of modernity, slaveowners began to purchase timepieces in growing numbers, adopting a clock-based conception of time and attempting in turn to instill a similar consciousness in their slaves. But, forbidden to own watches themselves, slaves did not internalize this idea to the same degree as their masters, and slaveholders found themselves dependent as much on the whip as on the clock when enforcing slaves' obedience to time. Ironically, Smith shows, freedom largely consolidated the dependence of masters as well as freedpeople on the clock.

This book is a full-color catalogue raisonne interprets the distinctive furniture made by John Shearer, one of the most accomplished and intriguing furniture makers during the post-Revolutionary period. Shearer emigrated from Scotland in the late 18th century and retained loyalist sympathies throughout his life, evidenced by the imagery and inscriptions sympathetic to various British causes_such as the suppression of the Irish rebellion in 1798 and the British victory in the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805_that he worked into his furniture. Davison provides insight into the furniture's appeal to Anglo-American patrons, not secret loyalists, but men still culturally tied to Great Britain. Shearer's pieces are scattered among various collections, and many of them have been identified only in the last 25 years. This catalog is the only work in which all of Shearer's known pieces of furniture are presented in a single volume.

Provides access to the art historical literature documenting the unique circumstances--social, historical, and ideological--from which women's art forms emerged. Includes the decorative or applied arts, contemporary crafts, folk art, and performance art ; feminist art criticism ; women's art organizations and galleries, artists organizations and galleries directory ; manuscript repositories and special collections ; biographical reference tools ; periodicals ; the literature of the field.