Winterthur Museum is world renowned for its decorative arts collections and its exceptional educational programs. Adapted from the training materials developed at the museum, the revised and enhanced Early American Decorative Arts, 1620-1860: A Handbook for Interpreters is an indispensable guide for anyone involved with interpretation of decorative arts collections. Early American Decorative Arts, 1620-1860 elucidates the principles of public interpretation, explains how to analyze objects, and defines the concept of style. Eighteen chapters provide comprehensive descriptions of decorative arts including furniture, ceramics, textiles, paintings and prints, metalwork, glass, and other objects. Many museums and historic sites display such collections to thousands of visitors annually. Guides, interpreters, educators, and collection managers will find this book a helpful summary and a guide to further research. This enhanced edition includes now includes a CD featuring beautiful color images of the more than 170 black-and-white photographs in the book, bringing the Winterthur collections to life on your computer and in your classroom. Published in cooperation with Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library.

This book presents new information on the export trade, patronage, artistic collaboration, and the small-scale shop traditions that defined early Rhode Island craftsmanship. This stunning volume features more than 200 illustrations of beautifully constructed and carved objects—including chairs, high chests, bureau tables, and clocks—that demonstrate the superb workmanship and artistic skill of the state’s furniture makers.

This volume fills a gap in traditional women's history books by offering fascinating details of the lives of early American women and showing how these women adapted to the challenges of daily life in the colonies. Women in Early America: Struggle, Survival, and Freedom in a New World provides insight into an era in American history when women had immense responsibilities and unusual freedoms. These women worked in a range of occupations such as tavernkeeping, printing, spiritual leadership, trading, and shopkeeping. Pipe smoking, beer drinking, and premarital sex were widespread. One of every eight people traveling with the British Army during the American Revolution was a woman. The coverage begins with the 1607 settlement at Jamestown and ends with the War of 1812. In addition to the role of Anglo-American women, the experiences of African, French, Dutch, and Native American women are discussed. The issues discussed include how women coped with rural isolation, why they were prone to superstitions, who was likely to give birth out of wedlock, and how they raised large families while coping with immense household responsibilities.

America’s colonial era began and ended dramatically, with the founding of the first enduring settlement at Jamestown on May 14, 1607 and the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776. During those 169 years, conflicts were endemic and often overlapping among the colonists, between the colonists and the original inhabitants, between the colonists and other imperial European peoples, and between the colonists and the mother country. As conflicts were endemic, so too were struggles for power. This study reveals the reasons for, stages, and results of these conflicts. The dynamic driving this history are two inseparable transformations as English subjects morphed into American citizens, and the core American cultural values morphed from communitarianism and theocracy into individualism and humanism. These developments in turn were shaped by the changing ways that the colonists governed, made money, waged war, worshipped, thought, wrote, and loved. Extraordinary individuals led that metamorphosis, explorers like John Smith and Daniel Boone, visionaries like John Winthrop and Thomas Jefferson, entrepreneurs like William Phips and John Hancock, dissidents like Rogers Williams and Anne Hutchinson, warriors like Miles Standish and Benjamin Church, free spirits like Thomas Morton and William Byrd, and creative writers like Anne Bradstreet and Robert Rogers. Then there was that quintessential man of America’s Enlightenment, Benjamin Franklin. And finally, George Washington who, more than anyone, was responsible for winning American independence when and how it happened.