Rural New England Furniture

This catalog illustrates and describes 164 pieces of New England furniture in the Colonial Williamsburg collection, including examples of nearly every type of household furniture made and used during the colonial period.

A New Nation of Goods highlights the significant role of provincial artisans in four crafts in the northeastern United States—chairmaking, clockmaking, portrait painting, and book publishing—to explain the shift from preindustrial society to an entirely new configuration of work, commodities, and culture.

Nashaway became Lancaster, Wachusett became Princeton, and all of Nipmuck County became the county of Worcester. Town by town, New England grew—Watertown, Sudbury, Turkey Hills, Fitchburg, Westminster, Walpole—and with each new community the myth of America flourished. In People of the Wachusett the history of the New England town becomes the cultural history of America's first frontier. Integral to this history are the firsthand narratives of town founders and citizens, English, French, and Native American, whose accounts of trading and warring, relocating and putting down roots proved essential to the building of these communities. Town plans, local records, broadside ballads, vernacular house forms and furniture, festivals—all come into play in this innovative book, giving a rich picture of early Americans creating towns and crafting historical memory. Beginning with the Wachusett, in northern Worcester County, Massachusetts, David Jaffee traces the founding of towns through inland New England and Nova Scotia, from the mid-seventeenth century through the Revolutionary Era. His history of New England's settlement is one in which the replication of towns across the landscape is inextricable from the creation of a regional and national culture, with stories about colonization giving shape and meaning to New England life.

This charming book portrays domestic life in New England during the century between the American Revolution and the Civil War. Drawing on diaries, letters, wills, newspapers, and other sources, Jane C. Nylander provides intimate details about preparing dinner, spinning and weaving textiles, washing and ironing laundry, planning a social outing, and exchanging food and services. Probing behind the many myths that have grown up about this era, Nylander reveals the complex reality of everyday life in old New England. "Nylander . . . invites her readers to enjoy her copious knowledge of the interiors and domestic management of late-18th-century New England homes. The imaginatively illustrated [book] is dedicated to the notion that the details of everyday life form the core of human experience."--Martha Saxton, The New York Times Book Review A fact-filled, copiously illustrated, revealing survey of Yankee life and households in an earlier time, . . . informative and valuable for its many glimpses of American interiors."--Kirkus Reviews "A delightfully intimate portrayal of New England home life. . . . Enlivened by 162 period illustrations, [Nylander's] survey affords a rare glimpse of middle- and upper-class housework, clothing, kitchens, diet, socializing and much else."--Publishers Weekly A century-long portrait of day-to-day activities in a New England home. . . . Nylander's nitty-gritty approach is absorbing. . . . Photographs from various historical societies along with period sketches and paintings add pizzazz and authenticity."--Booklist "A visual and narrative feast."--Robert St. George, University of Pennsylvania

DIVIllustrated exploration of principal designs used in North America over past 400 years. 95 measured drawings enable woodworkers to construct for candlestand, pedestal table, rocker, corner cupboard, cradle, armoire, many more. /div

The African American Community in Rural New England: W. E. B. Du Bois and His Boyhood Church: W. E. B. Du Bois and His Boyhood Church (formerly published in hardcover as Sewing Circles, Dime Suppers, and W. E. B. Du Bois: A History of the Clinton A. M. E. Zion Church) is a story of a small New England church's role in the national civil rights movement. Featuring more famous figures such as Du Bois, this book also tells the story of the church's lesser known members who struggled to keep it in existence, all the while fighting for their rights in a shifting social climate. The African American Community in Rural New England is the often heroic tale of a small group of African Americans who founded and have maintained their church in a small New England town for nearly 140 years. The church is the Clinton African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church and the town is Great Barrington, Massachusetts - the hometown of the leading African American scholar and activist W. E. B. Du Bois. Du Bois attended the church as a youth and wrote about it; these writings are one source for this history. The book gives readers a broad view of the details of the church's history and recounts the story of its growth. Du Bois plays a crucial role in the national fight for social justice, of which the church was and remains an important part.