Elfe was among the first of the great American furniture makers. Craftsmen love this book for the easy-to-follow patterns; collectors of southern antiques value it for reference.

This vintage volume contains a classic study of Charleston furniture. With over one hundred and forty authentic photographs, this guide catalogues the famous designs of some of the most sought-after furniture in North America. Contents include: “Sources of Furniture”, “English Importations”, “American Importations”, “Other Importations”, “Negro Cabinet-Makers”, “Kinds of Furniture used in Charleston”, “Kinds of Furniture Not Made in Charleston”, “Styles and Influences”, “Schools”, “Labels”, etc. Many vintage books like this are becoming increasingly hard-to-come-by and expensive. We are republishing this volume now in an affordable, high-quality addition complete with a specially commissioned new introduction on Charleston furniture.

Over the course of the eighteenth century, Anglo-Americans purchased an unprecedented number and array of goods. The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America investigates these diverse artifacts—from portraits and city views to gravestones, dressing furniture, and prosthetic devices—to explore how elite American consumers assembled objects to form a new civil society on the margins of the British Empire. In this interdisciplinary transatlantic study, artifacts emerge as key players in the formation of Anglo-American communities and eventually of American citizenship. Deftly interweaving analysis of images with furniture, architecture, clothing, and literary works, Van Horn reconstructs the networks of goods that bound together consumers in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston. Moving beyond emulation and the desire for social status as the primary motivators for consumption, Van Horn shows that Anglo-Americans' material choices were intimately bound up with their efforts to distance themselves from Native Americans and African Americans. She also traces women's contested place in forging provincial culture. As encountered through a woman's application of makeup at her dressing table or an amputee's donning of a wooden leg after the Revolutionary War, material artifacts were far from passive markers of rank or political identification. They made Anglo-American society.

In the colonial era, Charleston, South Carolina, was the largest city in the American South. From 1700 to 1775 its growth rate was exceeded in the New World only by that of Philadelphia. The first comprehensive study of this crucial colonial center, Building Charleston charts the rise of one of early America's great cities, revealing its importance to the evolution of both South Carolina and the British Atlantic world during the eighteenth century. In many of the southern colonies, plantation agriculture was the sole source of prosperity, shaping the destiny of nearly all inhabitants, both free and enslaved. The insistence of South Carolina's founders on the creation of towns, however, meant that this colony, unlike its counterparts, would also be shaped by the imperatives of urban society. In this respect, South Carolina followed developments in the rest of the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world, where towns were growing rapidly in size and influence. At the vanguard of change, burgeoning urban spaces across the British Atlantic ushered in industrial development, consumerism, social restructuring, and a new era in political life. Charleston proved no less an engine of change for the colonial Low Country, promoting early industrialization, forging an ambitious middle class, a consumer society, and a vigorous political scene. Bringing these previously neglected aspects of early South Carolinian society to our attention, Emma Hart challenges the popular image of the prerevolutionary South as a society completely shaped by staple agriculture. Moreover, Building Charleston places the colonial American town, for the first time, at the very heart of a transatlantic process of urban development.