“Building Order on Beacon Hill, 1790-1850,” considers the history of Boston’s iconic Beacon Hill neighborhood during the period of its most intensive development. It reconsiders the scholarly and popular understanding of this place as a district of wealth and refinement to show that its inhabitants and their houses reflect a more complete cross-section of Boston’s population. It provides a much fuller accounting of this neighborhood’s significance by interpreting the residences of a wide range of its population, including the free African-Americans and Irish immigrants who occupied Revere and Joy streets in the 1840s as well as the developers, merchants, and attorneys who built along Beacon and Mount Vernon streets in the 1790s and 1800s. At the same time, it illustrates how houses, whether expensive mansions, speculative rows or tenements, worked to bring order to everyday life, whether by regulating the movement of guests and servants through a gentry house of the 1810s or by providing an arena for polite sociability in the double parlors of the 1830s and 40s. This analysis shows how the residents of Beacon Hill attempted to solve perceived social problems through building. While it is attentive to built form, recording standing buildings in plans and photographs, it also takes pains to populate Beacon Hill’s buildings through careful attention to the documentary record, to show how the significance of architecture is contingent and dependent on use. Several of Charles Bulfinch’s remarkable mansions, for example, were demolished within two generations, converted to rows of smaller and more profitable houses in the 1830s and 40s. By considering the changing significance of the neighborhood and its individual buildings over several decades, it shows the fleeting quality of architectural significance as well as the limitations of any approach to architecture that only considers the moment of its creation.

This study traces the development of American architecture from the age of Jefferson to the antebellum era, providing a survey of this important period. W. Barksdale Maynard overturns the long-accepted notions that the chief theme of early 19th-century American architecture was a patriotic desire to escape from European influence and that competing styles chiefly reflected the American struggle for cultural uniqueness. Instead, deep and consistent aesthetic ties, especially with England, shaped American architecture and house designs. Maynard shows that the Greek Revival in particular was an international phenomenon, with American achievements inspired by British example and with taste taking precedence over patriotism.

This book presents the meticulous case studies of three individual houses from different eras, which serve to depict the social, political, and cultural effects that domestic architecture and interior design had on the upper class, the city of Boston, and a national American identity. It takes the reader on a journey to 18th and 19th century Boston and provides insight into the lives of these prominent men and women as seen through the perspective of their homes. It is a novel examination of the cultural significance of domestic architecture and interior design and, because of its story-telling character and extensive attention to detail, it is fascinating for curious readers and cultural historians alike.

One of the oldest neighborhoods in the United States, Beacon Hill welcomed its first resident in the 1620s. Serving as a strategic lookout during the Revolutionary War and a fashionable address for Boston's most prominent families in the early 1800s, the hill enjoys an architectural continuity and integrity highlighted by cobblestone streets, gas lamps, and hidden gardens.

For Gwendolyn Wright, the houses of America are the diaries of the American people. They create a fascinating chronicle of the way we have lived, and a reflection of every political, economic, or social issue we have been concerned with. Why did plantation owners build uniform cabins for their slaves? Why were all the walls in nineteenth-century tenements painted white? Why did the parlor suddenly disappear from middle-class houses at the turn of the century? How did the federal highway system change the way millions of Americans raised their families? Building the Dream introduces the parade of people, policies, and ideologies that have shaped the course of our daily lives by shaping the rooms we have grown up in. In the row houses of colonial Philadelphia, the luxury apartments of New York City, the prefab houses of Levittown, and the public-housing towers of Chicago, Wright discovers revealing clues to our past and a new way of looking at such contemporary issues as integration, sustainable energy, the needs of the elderly, and how we define "family."