Architecture and Artifacts of the Pennsylvania Germans: Constructing Identity in Early America. By Cynthia G. Falk. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008. xiv, 241 pp. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-271-03338-9.)

Abstract

Employing five main chapters backed up by a fine introduction, two appendices, and over one hundred illustrations, Cynthia G. Falk, an associate professor in the Cooperstown Graduate Program for material culture at the State University of New York, ably links an immigrant people to the objects of their heritage and deciphers the objects' meaning. She interprets material culture as a physical manifestation of personal identity. Falk's first chapter examines the historiography of Pennsylvania Germans. In the second chapter she unravels eighteenth-century accounts by people outside of the state's German culture and decodes their material culture to separate caricature from substance. In the third and fourth chapters she analyzes how markers of social and economic status, rather than observed stereotypes, can be used to accurately depict the Germans of the Keystone State. Chapter 4 examines how the religious ideals espoused by Reformed and Lutheran congregations (dominant over numerically smaller Anabaptist sects, such as the Mennonites or the Moravians) attracted the interest of scholars.