Eighteenth-Century Prints in Colonial America: To Educate and Decorate

Abstract

This book is a collection of competent essays on aspects of the print in 18th-century America. It grows out of one of the annual conferences of the Print Curators, and its emphasis is on various categories of English prints circulated in America, although some attention is given to American prints produced in the latter part of the period. In its own terms, this collection contains significant insights and guidance, but they are only occasionally of direct value to readers of Technology and Culture; it does, however, point to a category of source material which requires increasing attention from students of material culture, of the social dimensions of technology, and even of the hardware history of machines. More than any other medium, prints were responsible for extending the visual world of the 18th century beyond the limits of personal experience. Individual images were so influential because there were so few of them, because travel was limited, and because alternative modes of visual communication were so limited. Even those Ameri-