Illustrated with 200 stunning photographs and encompassing objects from furniture and ceramics to jewelry and metal, this definitive work from Jo Lauria and Steve Fenton showcases some of the greatest pieces of American crafts of the last two centuries. Potter Craft

New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice A groundbreaking and endlessly surprising history of how artisans created America, from the nation's origins to the present day. At the center of the United States' economic and social development, according to conventional wisdom, are industry and technology-while craftspeople and handmade objects are relegated to a bygone past. Renowned historian Glenn Adamson turns that narrative on its head in this innovative account, revealing makers' central role in shaping America's identity. Examine any phase of the nation's struggle to define itself, and artisans are there-from the silversmith Paul Revere and the revolutionary carpenters and blacksmiths who hurled tea into Boston Harbor, to today's “maker movement.” From Mother Jones to Rosie the Riveter. From Betsy Ross to Rosa Parks. From suffrage banners to the AIDS Quilt. Adamson shows that craft has long been implicated in debates around equality, education, and class. Artisanship has often been a site of resistance for oppressed people, such as enslaved African-Americans whose skilled labor might confer hard-won agency under bondage, or the Native American makers who adapted traditional arts into statements of modernity. Theirs are among the array of memorable portraits of Americans both celebrated and unfamiliar in this richly peopled book. As Adamson argues, these artisans' stories speak to our collective striving toward a more perfect union. From the beginning, America had to be-and still remains to be-crafted.

This fresh look at the Arts and Crafts Movement charts its origins in reformist ideals, its engagement with commercial culture, and its ultimate place in everyday households.

The magnificent art and decorative craftsmanship of the Indian tribes of North America appear in all of their colonial variety and complexity in this superb volume. Examples are included of the work of every major region in the areas now comprising the United States and Canada, of most of the numerically important or artistically pre-eminent tribes, and all of the major techniques employed by Indian artists. No reader of this book can long continue in a misapprehension of the stereotyped image of 'the Indian.' The varying cultures which developed on the North American continent - from the Eskimo hunters of the Arctic to the woodland League of the Iroquois, and from the Pueblo agriculturalists to the nomads of the Great Plains - are all represented. Each found its own ways of using available natural resources for utilitarian objects, for religious and ritual purposes, or for sheer aesthetic pleasure. The book abounds in beautiful examples of characteristics shell and quill work, pottery and weaving, deer and buffalo hide painting, carved stone pipes and tomahawks so commonly associated with Indian cultures. Less familiar are illustrations of mysterious stone effigy sculptures from the death-cults of the ancient Southeast; sophisticated carvings in stone and ivory from the Midwest; elaborate horse-trappings and costuming from the Great Plains; and a fascinating variety of masks. Dr. Dockstader draws upon a thorough knowledge of Indian life, custom and artistic tradition to relate this material to its sources in his introduction and in the extensive background comments accompanying each of the illustrations. He sees the art of the American Indian not as a subject for static sociological research, but as a living and continuing expression of a vital people, and he has included in this book a number of examples of recent and contemporary work by Indian artists. -- from dust jacket.

"Lucy Davies and Mo Fini have distilled the essence of their extensive research into the creative traditions of this vast area, and also include invaluable advice. With the aid of special and often spectacular - photography, they examine all the main media: pottery, wonderfully simple and utilitarian or formed in complex and ritualistic shapes, jewelry and metalwork in a multiplicity of forms, the arts of weaving plant fibre - sombreros and panamas, bags and baskets; the ancient textile tradition of the Wayuu. Painting on clay, leather and glass; wood carving and decoration of dried gourds; and extraordinary crafts such as figuras de masapan, colourful imaginative bread dough figures."--BOOK COVER.