Building America: The Life of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

Abstract

Benjamin Henry Latrobe was one of those early American figures whose talents, outsized personality, and rises and falls reveal much about the new United States. Jean H. Baker argues that he ought to be considered “a founder of the republic—not of political ideas but of the neoclassical buildings and substantial internal improvements that expressed those ideals” (p. 1). Latrobe's work as an architect and designer had an indelible effect on the nation. And because of Baker's painstaking reconstruction of his life, we now know much more about the character behind those visions. As the author demonstrates, understanding Latrobe requires unpacking the man's many contradictions. Raised in a Moravian community in Fulneck, northern England, and initially intended for the church, he ultimately became a deist. Whereas the Moravians in Fulneck had raised children communally rather than under the control of their birth parents, he embraced the nuclear family model as an...