BERNARD L. HERMAN. Town House: Architecture and Material Life in the Early American City, 1780-1830. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Va. 2005. Pp. xviii, 295. $45.00

Abstract

In this wide-ranging and amply illustrated work, Bernard L. Herman examines “urban dwellings and the people who built and lived in them” in American port cities between 1780 and 1830, an era when maritime trade knit the Atlantic world together and its merchants set the terms of genteel sociability (p. 1). The book abounds in insights. Largely by studying dwellings—whether occupied by merchants, artisans, widows, or slaves—and the material objects found in them, Herman seeks to learn “how and why people acted in particular ways” and “the larger cultural significances of their actions” (p. 1). No overarching thesis unifies this book. Casting his study as “a series of explorations,” Herman gives each chapter a distinctive focus. Chapter two, which begins the exploration, examines how elite merchants in Norfolk, Virginia; Portsmouth, New Hampshire; and Charleston, South Carolina, built and furnished their houses, especially as magnificent settings for the polite gamesmanship then familiar throughout the transatlantic world. Chapter three studies Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the only inland market town to be considered, showing how “burghers” of lesser means reconciled newly fashionable neoclassical taste in house design with older, local-German building traditions. This same chapter also sketches similar “negotiations” between “cosmopolitan” and “backcountry” town houses in Portsmouth and other New England ports, finding that newer forms typically dominated the city's core but not its outskirts.