This guide to the Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera, named for Winterthur's first curator, provides descriptive information for the primary research material held in the collection. The Downs Collection acquires materials from the mid seventeenth century through the twentieth century that document American lifestyles, concentrating on the domestic scene and activities within the household and art. It includes such items as diaries, business accounts of craftsmen whose products decorated dwelling houses, family papers, tax records, construction of homes, artists' sketchbooks, wills and household inventories, children's toys and games, and scrapbooks and journals. Items from individuals famous in American history rest alongside materials from people who led routine lives yet still contributed to the development of America. An extensive microform collection, including copies of material owned by other public repositories and private individuals, supplements the manuscript holdings. Hardcover is un-jacketed.

Through the story of a portrait of a woman in a silk dress, historian Zara Anishanslin embarks on a fascinating journey, exploring and refining debates about the cultural history of the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world. While most scholarship on commodities focuses either on labor and production or on consumption and use, Anishanslin unifies both, examining the worlds of four identifiable people who produced, wore, and represented this object: a London weaver, one of early modern Britain’s few women silk designers, a Philadelphia merchant’s wife, and a New England painter. Blending macro and micro history with nuanced gender analysis, Anishanslin shows how making, buying, and using goods in the British Atlantic created an object-based community that tied its inhabitants together, while also allowing for different views of the Empire. Investigating a range of subjects including self-fashioning, identity, natural history, politics, and trade, Anishanslin makes major contributions both to the study of material culture and to our ongoing conversation about how to write history.

An ideal sourcebook for architects, woodworkers, and homeowners, this beautiful reference showcases the stunning architectural details of the Winterthur Museum. This guided tour explores 33 rooms from the Georgian and Federal periods with stunning photography, architectural terms, detailed drawings, and fascinating commentary.

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A renowned literary coterie in eighteenth-century Philadelphia—Elizabeth Fergusson, Hannah Griffitts, Deborah Logan, Annis Stockton, and Susanna Wright—wrote and exchanged thousands of poems and maintained elaborate handwritten commonplace books of memorabilia. Through their creativity and celebrated hospitality, they initiated a salon culture in their great country houses in the Delaware Valley. In this stunningly original and heavily illustrated book, Susan M. Stabile shows that these female writers sought to memorialize their lives and aesthetic experience—a purpose that stands in marked contrast to the civic concerns of male authors in the republican era. Drawing equally on material culture and literary history, Stabile discusses how the group used their writings to explore and at times replicate the arrangement of their material possessions, including desks, writing paraphernalia, mirrors, miniatures, beds, and coffins. As she reconstructs the poetics of memory that informed the women's lives and structured their manuscripts, Stabile focuses on vernacular architecture, penmanship, souvenir collecting, and mourning. Empirically rich and nuanced in its readings of different kinds of artifacts, this engaging work tells of the erasure of the women's lives from the national memory as the feminine aesthetic of scribal publication was overshadowed by the proliferating print culture of late eighteenth-century America.