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A New Nation of Goods: The Material Culture of Early America. By David Jaffee. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Pp. 400. Cloth, $45.00.)
Reviewed by Wendy A. Woloson
A New Nation of Goods is the latest contribution to a growing body of scholarship dedicated to American material life from the 1790s to the 1850s. David Jaffee's new book documents the material objects and creators that together worked as agents of change, driving the cultural and material transformations that paved the way for mass consumption before the Civil War. Focusing on New England towns in Massachusetts and Connecticut, the author richly details how, like their urban counterparts, Americans living in the hinterlands had serious material aspirations that were fulfilled by a group of talented local artisans.
Each sprawling chapter begins with a different object, moving us through time, generations, and significant market transformations. The book opens with a deep analysis of two eighteenth-century portrait paintings of the Ebenezer Devotions Sr. and Jr., illustrating the shifts in education, religion, craftsmanship, cultural authority, and regional culture from one generation to the next. The paintings depict the intellectual authority of the clergyman and its displacement by the economic authority of the ascendant merchant, the father's extensive library in the background of his portrait replaced by a quill pen and open account book in the foreground of his son's portrait.
The following chapter on the "Village Enlightenment" documents these shifts in greater detail. The object lesson here is Marlborough, Massachusetts resident Silas Felton's Franklinesque manuscript autobiography, which, among other things, expresses his keen desire to read books all day, rejecting the life of farming into which he was born. For ambitious young men, the country's increasing access to print exposed them to new ideas that were themselves agents of cultural change and inspired their readers, already primed and anxious for new experiences, to be the agents of change through the production and consumption of consumer goods. This "new group of lesser lights, the rising men and women of the post-Revolutionary gentry," according to Jaffee, were "eager to engage in the project of improving their persons, their houses, and their villages" (96).
The process of "cultural integration and hybridization" (145) that took place in newly "cosmopolitan communities" could not have...