Two Carpenters

This innovative study examines the lives of two New England carpenters, Calvin and George Stearns, who were active in the first half of the nineteenth century. Drawing on their written accounts and examining their legacy of buildings—a record as extensive and richly detailed as any that exists—J. Ritchie Garrison recovers the stylistic influences, family patterns, work habits, social customs, tools, and business practices that shaped the Stearnses’ identities as rural builders during a time of profound change. Although study of the region’s architectural forms began in the late nineteenth century and social historians have extensively discussed the emergence of rural capitalism in New England, there is still much to learn about the process by which these landscapes and buildings came into being. As Garrison shows, the Stearnses personified the dynamic interrelationships of city and country, and of industry and farming, as they filtered change through the actions of everyday living. Profusely illustrated with drawings and photographs, the book follows the Stearnses as they moved from newly settled towns on New England’s northern frontier, to federal-era Boston, the agricultural village of Northfield, Massachusetts, and the resort community of Brattleboro, Vermont. By tracing the lives and careers of these two carpenters, Garrison provokes readers to consider why things look the way they do, how they got that way, and what they mean.J. Ritchie Garrison is director of the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture and professor of history at the University of Delaware. His is the author of Landscape and Material Life in Franklin County, Massachusetts, 1770–1860.

In the '60s and '70s, America's music scene was marked by raucous excess, reflected in the tragic overdoses of young superstars such as Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. At the same time, the uplifting harmonies and sunny lyrics that propelled Karen Carpenter and her brother, Richard, to international fame belied a different sort of tragedy—the underconsumption that led to Karen's death at age thirty-two from the effects of an eating disorder. In Why Karen Carpenter Matters, Karen Tongson (whose Filipino musician parents named her after the pop icon) interweaves the story of the singer’s rise to fame with her own trans-Pacific journey between the Philippines—where imitations of American pop styles flourished—and Karen Carpenter’s home ground of Southern California. Tongson reveals why the Carpenters' chart-topping, seemingly whitewashed musical fantasies of "normal love" can now have profound significance for her—as well as for other people of color, LGBT+ communities, and anyone outside the mainstream culture usually associated with Karen Carpenter’s legacy. This hybrid of memoir and biography excavates the destructive perfectionism at the root of the Carpenters’ sound, while finding the beauty in the singer's all too brief life.