so when i moved to this new project which i confess was quite some time ago but finally the fruits of it are done is really a pleasure to be here where much of that project started. i've really been involved in a long-term education and re-education since my original training was as an americanist and not really thinking of things. this has been a more recent development. i wanted to share with you some of my thoughts about how we really do history with objects. that's why i thought about calling this learning to look at early american material culture. so let me start with an extended anecdote. and so this is also robert peckham who is going to be part of this. this really brackets winthrop chandler and robert peckham of

westminster, the beginning and end of this century-long study that i've completed. when i was visiting the benington museum a few summers ago i not only made the acquaintance of james wilson, first american commercial globemaker but i discovered the unique power of objects to tell a story that's not available to us from the textural record. to be honest, i had come to the museum really -- although i said i came to look at objects i came to look at the cure torial files, looking at text, which i was much more comfortable with. an exhibit on vermont furniture in the early republic. but as i wandered through the sunlit main gallery where the museum's treasured objects were displayed, i started to see things that helped me understand how artisans and consumers -- and those are really the two groups -- imagined their world. first my eye was struck by a large neoclassical sideboard that you see here with this -- oops.

with this graceful bow front and sleek lines looking for all the world like a sophisticated boston product, but it was made in windsor, vermont. in fact when you look at the inlays here, you can see that three of the inlays go in one direction and the fourth goes in the other. and my assumption there is that this is a person, a cabinetmaker who actually didn't make lots of sideboards. the fact that he was m was muc familiar than his metropolitan colleague, and that accounts for some of the variances in construction. at the other end of the museum i noticed a musical tall clock built by a vermont clock making partnership. it boasted a calendar wheel, a moon dial and played seven tunes each with for a different day of the week with a psalm for sunday. then i noticed a large -- really

not just a large -- a massive desk and inpsych low ped ya filled book case that you see before you, really dominating a whole corner of the room where the museum had reconstructed the interior of a vermont home. as i moved closer, the desk, i learned belonged to james wilson of bradford, vermont. a town quite far north along the connecticut river. inching even closer, because i really wasn't familiar, the label stated that wilson was the united states' first globemaker and one of wilson's early globes sat there in a plexi case in the front of the display. seemed strange to me that in such a relatively out of the way place as bradford in the early 19th century that globe making -- the first american globes were being made. i really left the museum that day really enthralled with the

thought about learning more about james wilson. how could a globemaker have worked the upper connecticut river valley in the 1870s. how did he learn about globemaking? what were the sources of his information, but also his inspiration. what gave him the project of being a globemaker at the time. as i learned oerz eed others - can see here. as i learned, others in the hinterland had tried to make globes. samuel lane, for example, made this idiosyncratic version of a terrestrial globe around 1760. so the idea of the first, as always, is a somewhat of a misnomer. when you start to look at things the layers peel back further. however lane's was not a commercial globe. he made this for his own purposes. he turned a seven-inch oak

sphere, scored the painted surface, cut the degrees and continental boundaries into the painted surface, then pinned it, as you see here n a pine table made in the form of a milking stool. so it could revolve. so again the local materials that he utilized for this. and really the larger goal here of clocks and globes offering consumers visual control over time and space. satisfy the quest for knowledge while fulfilling a refined person's desire to exhibit symbols of gentility. this is a source of information and knowledge, but it's also an object for decorative display. it serves both purposes. and really the story of james wilson offers a compelling look at the role of the object in structuring knowledge. and the curious ways of achieving that goal in the early republic. because there's something special about and

place as to why someone like wilson -- what i really called the village enlightenment -- was critical to his decision and also his ability. because of course you can want to make globe, but whether you can make them, whether you can get the resources and then, of course, whether you can sell them is quite another question. james wilson, farmer and blacksmith, created the first commercial globes in north america from his provincial station in bradford, vermont. and this is really a remarkable saga of a vision of a backwoods craftsman navigating among the arts and sciences to produce new commercial commodities in the new nation. and i think those newnesses there of not just new commodities, but the fact that this is just a few years after the war for independence, it's also a story of american cultural independence because, of course, most -- all globes before wilson's were imported.

mostly from london makers, also e edinburgh and other british globes. illustrated here is one of his early creation, a terrestrial globe. i can go back to the full globe, produced about 1810, 13 inches in diameter. wilson was born in londonderry, new hampshire, in 1763, received relatively little formal education. he worked in his father's farm and learned blacksmithing from his uncle. but in 1795 he set off to really search for a new farm, more land of his own. he set off for bradford, vermont, crossing the connecticut river to visit relatives, then intending to proceed north. however, and this is a family story which i would take with a grain of salt. it's somewhat apocryphal, but it serves my purposes wonderfully so of course i'm going to use it. according to these family accounts he saw a pair of

terrestrial and celestial globes, and globes at this point in time usually were in pairs. probably these are the first globes he ever saw. but he saw them, according to this story, at dartmouth where he peered at them through the keyhole of a locked laboratory room. so how much better could it be in terms of knowledge hidden from him, objects that are unavailable to someone of his middling station. and this supposedly fired his imagination that he was going to make his own globes, which he was then going to sell to a wider populace. this visit furthered his resolve to manufacture his own globes. later that year he moved to bradford where he and a cousin manufactured axes that winter to pay for his newly acquired land. and the next year he made his first globe. it was a large, solid, wooden

ball covered with paper with the continents and countries drawn in pen and ink. and if you know anything about globemaking, of course, commercial globes are not solid spheres of wood, but rather they're papier-mache with a wooden cross that holds them together. but his first problem that he faced was his limited knowledge of geography, astronomy and c t cartograp cartography, which is quite a handful. however, he realized $130 by the sale of his farm produce and stock that winter, which allowed him to purchase the 18 volumes of the encyclopedia britannica. published in edinburgh which was a vast compendium of the arts and sciences related to globemaking. there are extensive entries in that enpsych low ped ya on globes, cartography and various other geographic information.

he's really able to obtain this at a general store relatively close to where he's living. so i'm arguing here that encyclopedias are really the archetypal artifacts with their compendium, what they promise is all of recognized knowledge in one place, in one area, and in making that information available through print even in northern new hampshire -- new england. wilson then, with his woodworking skills, constructed this imposing desk and bookcase to house his prized possession. his next hurdle was engraving on copper. again he walked to new haven to meet amos doolittle, the engraver of the two maps in jed dedie ya's geography made easy. which was the first text published in the united states in 1784. he's really able again through the proliferation of print in

the late 18th century to obtain all of this information without really at this point in time until he's met morris, any personal contact with someone who was a cartographer or a globemaker. the physical construction of the globe came after that. he used his original globe as a model covering it with paper, gluing several layers together, tracing the continental outlines, cutting the paper in spheres, and here you can see actually the encyclopedia entry on globemaking. and then -- and this is actually from a recent reconstruction of the bradford, vermont, globe. here you can see quite clearly the different -- this is the globe before its restoration. so you can see the papier-mache with the skim coating of plaster over it that keeps it together. the different gores, then you

can see -- so these are really 12 gores that have the geographic information that he's engraved and that he then glues on to it. so i think this gives you a much better sense of how the globe is actually made by seeing this project. surmounting all these obstacles he spent nearly a year engraving his first large copper plate only to discover one final problem, the projection of meridians in true proportion on to a spherical surface. in other words, how do you take a flat thing and wrap it around a spherical object? he looked to boston for information there visiting morse himself for training, then had to begin all over again taking his copper plate, burnishing it and starting all over again. wilson worked on all aspects of globemaking over the next decade. he made everything himself. he built his own tools, lathes

and presses, mixed his own ink, shaped the spheres, designed and printed all of his own maps. by 1810, he had produced his own -- his first globes of paper, these terrestrial and celestial ones on, as i mentioned a paper core suspended in a birch frame with turned legs. only after this decade-long struggle to realize this vision was he able then to turn to commercial globemaking and began to manufacture and market these prized items that you see here. and really make a living out of this. when i was relying the story a few years ago at the museum, one of the students at that wonderful collection of early american things said, oh, but you know we actually have these embroidered globes that are made in the early 19th century by school girls. i had never really heard of the westtown school.

i said i would love to see one of those. and we marched up into the collections. and again it's really the power of objects to really make you think in new directions. it's the presence of these objects which really contributes to making connections. and so here you see sara shepherd's -- who was a student in the west town friends school -- who made this globe sampler a plain woven silk covering, a stuffed sphere. these are about the size of a grapefruit. and they're sort of filled. again, this is really a mixture of both embroidery and pen and ink drawing on the surface. you really have multimedia within this one officspherical object. although this is an 1844 example, they're really made as early as 1811. they're really concurrent which tells you about the narrative of american globemaking was constructed. it is not just wilson but the

westtown school where these globes are being made at the same time. one is printed, one is embroidered. one is textile, the other is paper and metal. these fabricated forms really make manifest the new nation through various educational and cultural activities. so my purpose in writing the new nation of goods was really to tell the story of these objects, and the story of really industrialation which i'll focus on in a minute, where in the middle 18th century a world of small things, imimported, changed dramatically in the next century and a different tale of industrialation, more out of winder chairs or out of globes or other furniture and textile forms is really quite different than the level paradigm. but i also very much intended to tell a story about the role of material culture and thinking

with things, historical studies, really a series of case studies, of artisans, consumers and each chapter begins with an object and i use that like the wilson globe as a way of unpacking larger issues of enlightenment of industrialization and so on. i would argue while they've embraced the study of the artifact in recent studies, social historical scholarship is spent relatively little attention to the role of materiality. material culture has been far less prominent in what i and others have called the visual turn. we've had studies of vernacular architecture, domestic textiles topics like city life or war an identity in 18th century north america and wonderful books by dale upton and ulrich. but historians have used objects more to illustrate their studies

of prior derived narratives from texts which they're much more comfortable reading and analyzing than they are the more shifty and untrustworthy artifact. so i really question it. and john styiles has a wonderfu quote. objects enable to world to happen and we need to pay attention to what objects do and how they work. i think that's a really telling remark. and because materials matter, it really is important to think about how -- i'm going to jump a little bit forward -- it really matters how we understand how an object might appeal to users and viewers as an item of display as well as an item of knowledge. how can we best understand why a chest of draws looks the way it looks? we can scan pattern books, other contemporary furniture for clue,

but why are certain designs made? we need to think about tools, the tactile experience of making that chest on a cabinetmaker's workbench. what were the decisions made not necessarily in intellectualized form but more of a tax tile, experienceal one? objects doex social markers of status, which is often how they're used. this signifies someone is refined or genteel. but that's like thinking of objects as a black box. doesn't really matter how they work. it just matters that you own one. and so i think that's -- they really have material presences. and that's why we have to learn to look. the construction of a windsor chair provides us insights about the changing division of labor as well as stylistic shifts taking place within the workshop. it really matters that this chair is centered in the chair seat and everything is sort of bolted into that. this provides a sturdy platform.

but also the fact that these different pieces, these spindles as well as the legs are all turned on the lathe means that many of these relatively simplified forms can be made not necessarily in a chairmaker's shop but can be hacked out in a lumber yard or sort of saw mill dozens of miles away. so this allows really for a decentralized mode of manufacture throughout new england. so thiss make thousands of those spindles which are then assembled later. that's what i mean by looking beyond a textile model of manufacturers to see how these things which are not really necessarily hand made in a way that we -- so i really wanted to retell was the story of industrialization. while we collect wonderfully folky portraits of brightly clad children and colorfullyen chairs, we really value them often because we think they are so remote from the emerging

industrial colossus. it's the fact that they're folky, that hair hand mathey're that gives them value, especially in the market. but that chair is very much part of an emerging industrial mode of manufacturing. so i was really interested in ow this world of small things luxuries. and so i really begin with ebenezer devotion. that's really how the book begins. a stern minister of for his por in his woodstock, connecticut, studththa had commissioned in 1770. and this was commissioned from the decorative artist and portraitist winthrop chandler whose self-portrait i showed at the very beginning. ebenezer sternly sits on a fashionable but restrained chippendale chair. chandler is so much the decorative artist, so much the realist that he depicts every one of the tacks in chandler's

chair including the ones that are -- the empty spaces where they're missing. so again, focus on ver similitude, that he's interested in giving light to the face as well as the chair, which i think is also the characteristics of much of this. he's sitting there with his well thumbed book collection of books, and i've thumbed through those books in the brookline public library. and they're culled from geneva, from london, they're really an atlantic world library.so this most of these goods in the 1760s, 1770s are ebenezer owns a london tall clock at a time when tall clocks were relatively rare. what's really interesting to me is after the war for independence, a newly decentralized world of goods and consumers refashions luxury goods like tall clocks, like weighty, imported literary tomes

into new popular biographies. you get a whole range of chairs. you get like this philadelphia chair here with this incredible carving by a scottish immigrant, thomas affleck. chairmakers and this really rich carving which really drapes off of this, but at the same time you get something made by chapin in winder, connecticut. he goes to philadelphia, learns much of this chairmake iing at time. but when he goes back to connecticut he may bes something much plainer. a whole range of different vocabularies that are available according to what their patron, what their customers would have desired in their homes. it wasn't that they couldn't make something fancier. it is that they are really targeting their mode of manufacture to appeal to the pocketbook as well as the design vocabulary of their customers.

and so, in my talking about refashioning, instead of the very expensive john marshall life of washington, you get someone like mason weems, the peddler and author who really refashions biographiy into a whole series of these popular biographies such thaz life of george washington, which starts as a pamphlet, then gets expanded. or you also start to get portrait painters like ralph earl, who first starts out in massachusetts, then moves to great britain during the revolution. he's a loyalist. 1783 he looks around and decides is this a good time to come back to the now united states. and so again although he's trained in a british style, he's able to paint in a brushy mode like sir joshua reynolds. maybe not quite like sir joshua

reynolds. then he goes to connecticut to paint elijah boardman, he paints in a much older liny flat mode. but he also paints boardman -- as you can see here, this is a huge seven-foot portrait in a trompe l'oeil portrait. it looks like he's about to step off of the canvas and join nus the room. or you can also get something like james wilson who moved to not just making these 13-inch globes but he also downsizes, so to speak, and this is a three-inch globe. far cheaper, much less geographic information on the globe, of course, but also rangd now in a place and a cost that many more people could afford. so again you're getting a much wider range and hierarchy of different types of products, many of which were imported only now are made domestically. so even to take you through the

whole process with chairmaking, you start out with brass clocks which have a brass mechanism. brass is imported in the 1780s, 1790s like daniel bernap makes. then you get eli tarrant, these connecticut clockmakers start to make their clocks. but they don't use brass, they use a legal material, wood, which is available. it doesn't work as well in a humid new england summer. the wheels will swell up, that will mean you'll lose time, but it's a fifth, a third the price of a brass clock. but still a tall clock which is relatively costly. by the 18-teens what ely terry does is shrink it into a shelf clock. as you know that sits on a mantlepiece. not only do you have that, but you now get the case included. instead of having to buy a case

separately from a cabinetmaker to put your brass movement clock in, you get the whole piece together. again, you can see here where the numerals painted on the glass door. and by the 1820s, this now begins to look like much of the sort of fancier furniture at the time with these finials here, with a painted-on-glass dial. and sort of much richer item that really looks like a piece of furniture as opposed to just a clock. i could walk you through the same process here in 1820s, 1830s with what i call the tale of two cities gardner and sterling. they both start out making chairs lie you can see here, the production of joel pratt, a sterling chairmaker in 1776. they're not even singular products but they're being made in sets because people have now many more products, many more commodities in their households.

and so what's interesting here is that pratt makes these chairs in a really decentralized mode. he doesn't make everything within his shop. he has people in different shops, different sawmills throughout the region extending into southern new hampshire who are making parts for him. in many cases he's just assembling those parts and sending them down the blackstone canal to providence. as they're distributed really throughout the united states. at the same time production begins in gardner, but gardner takes a different road. the haywoods really invest their energy not in making these chairs in a decentralized mode but rather they invest in machinery. so they use water power more and more. so they bring production inside the factory. so instead of the out work system, they use a factory system. over time by the 1830s gardner really pushes ahead of sterling, but what's really important to me for my argument in the 18

teens, 1820s, there's many more years. he makes more in this hand mode system. and that's a phenomenal amount of chairs. so again it's really within this older handworked system you cand it up. it is not really the machinery that's the cutting edge at all. the machinery comes at the end of the process and allows them to consolidate their goals. and so then by the 1820s and 30s, you get really the mixture of these chairs into what was the most popular chair at the time, which is the hitchcock chair. it brings all that production home. again like my sideboard uses much more simplified turning so you can make these much faster. he puts this gold striping. but the gold striping really extends over to the front of the chair. if you turn it around you would

see that it doesn't have the striping on the back. there's all sorts of labor saving techniques. he now uses a stencil for this painting instead of freehand painting which you'd find in more expensive items. a wider range of decorative techniques, but much of this is really -- or you get, at the higher end, you get aldon spooner who makes -- and for many years these chests of drawers were believed to be made in newport because they sort of look a lot like newport furniture if you're a connoisseur of this. because it was believed that someone in athol couldn't make this, it was too high end. but we find that spooner probably had an apprentice in his shop who really helped him integrate some of the newer techniques. again in terms of materiality, look at these over always. it's really quite striking the design. you are getting