New Views of New England – Studies in Material and Visual Culture, 1680–1830

Beautifully illustrated, this collection of essays will introduce the reader to a rich, surprising, thought-provoking, and entirely new view of early New England. Eleven essays written by historians, archaeologists, art and architectural historians, and literary scholars recast our understanding of New England by setting its material and visual culture in new contexts. Essays on the archaeology of seventeenth-century Maine settlements, the geographical knowledge of Salem sailors and ship captains, the mid-eighteenth-century cartographic depictions of Boston, and the built environment of Maine in the early nineteenth century all place New England into the broader purview of a transoceanic movement of people, ideas, and objects.

Martha J. McNamara, author of From Tavern to Courthouse: Architecture and Ritual in American Law, 1658–1860, is director of the New England Arts and Architecture Program in the Department of Art at Wellesley College. Georgia B. Barnhill is the founding director of the Center for Historic American Visual Culture at the American Antiquarian Society.