BOOK REVIEWS The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and BiographyVol. CXXXVIII, No. 1 ( January 2014) Te Chesapeake House: Architectural Investigations by Colonial Williamsburg. Edited by Cary Carson and Carl R. Lounsbury. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press/Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 2013. 488 pp, Illustrations,notes, index. $60.) In Te Chesapeake House, editors Cary Carson and Carl R. Lounsbury have gathered decades of research on the early buildings, landscapes, and social history of the Chesapeake region into a smart and beautiful package. Focused on the period from initial settlement (1607) to the early nineteenth century (ca. 1830),when factory production and improvements in transportation forever altered the craft of hand building, the book’s contributors provide a well-contextualized and amazingly detailed account of the evolution of building craft around theChesapeake. Te story begins with the most rudimentary post-in-ground houses of early settlement and ends with the ref ned and elegant townhouses and public buildings of the federal period. Te four main sections and seventeen chapters that make up this encyclopedic volume organize and synthesize over three decades of research by architectural historians at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation (CWF) and several other organizations.Beginning with the architects, archaeologists, and historians who arrived in Williamsburg in 1926, the research department at CWF has scoured the region for houses and landscapes that of er up critical evidence about the design, construc-tion, use, and social meaning of the region’s buildings. Traveling from Southside Virginia to Annapolis, Maryland, and from the Eastern Shore to the mountains of western Virginia, these scholars examined, measured, drew, and photographed thousands of houses, public buildings, agricultural structures, and landscapes in their quest to understand the built environment of the region. Emboldened bythe new social history, Williamsburg researchers broadened their approach in the 1970s and 1980s to encompass the homes of not just wealthy and politically con-nected Virginians, but those at all social levels, including enslaved Africans, white laborers, mechanics, and middle-class craftsmen. Simultaneously, they sought to address questions of building use and social meaning in a society that was eco-nomically structured around tobacco and slave labor—an agricultural society with few urban places. Cary Carson reminds readers that the work was carried out in the context of an outdoor history museum renowned for its restored buildings and decorative arts; thus, the book is a product of a research and interpretive program
108 BOOK REVIEWS January “that has explored one region, its buildings, and its records, relentlessly, for almost ninety years” (2).In the frst section, “Ends and Means,” the authors deftly lay out the setting and context for the story that follows. Cary Carson explores the importance of architecture as social history; Edward Chappell lays out the central place of f eld-work—the careful forensic study of building structure, material, and design—to the work of architectural historians in the Chesapeake; and Lorena Walsh pro-vides the historical framework on migration, society, economy, and settlement.Both Carson and Chappell remind us of the importance of multidisciplinaryapproaches—history, archaeology, anthropology, and geography, to name a few—to this scholarly undertaking.Te second section, “Design and Use,” ofers up excellent essays on the design process (Lounsbury), plantation housing in the seventeenth century (Carson),town houses and country houses in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries(Mark Wenger), the housing of slavery (Chappell), and the many agricultural build-ings that gave plantation landscapes the look of little villages (Orlando Ridout V ).Tese chapters are the intellectual core of the book in terms of understanding the ways in which buildings were designed and used in the colonial and early national Chesapeake. Drawing on their own extensive research and the work of colleagues across the region, the authors clearly demonstrate the power of physical evidence of space and place for unraveling complex social conventions and behaviors.In the sections “Materials” and “Finishes,” which comprise fully half the book,the authors closely examine and lay bare the abundant physical evidence leftbehind by skilled and semiskilled craftsman of the building trades. T ese chap-ters distill virtually all that is known about timber framing (Graham), brickwork (Lounsbury), hardware (Chappell), exterior fnishes (Graham), interior f nishes (Graham), paint (Susan Buck and Graham), and wallpaper (Margaret Pritchard and Graham) for the Chesapeake region. Tese essays provide “a richly illustrated guide to the regional forms, variations, and chronologies of building elements” (9).Every student of the built environment, from the dedicated historic-site visitor to the architectural scholar, will fnd value in this guide.Te Chesapeake House is a tour de force of feldwork, analysis, and synthesis,providing the most thorough and nuanced understanding of Chesapeake build-ings available. To some extent, the title masks the principal contribution of the book in helping the reader understand and appreciate the people who inhabited these spaces. As Carson notes, the “intrinsic connection between dwellings and dwellers guides our research and . . . provides the underlying rationale for this book” (2). “Te objective,” notes Chappell, “is to read the physical evidence as a means of understanding past intentions and patterns of behavior” (32). In this regard, the book succeeds at every level and is in every way an instant classic.Tis thick and richly illustrated volume is a must for researchers working on all aspects of Chesapeake history and culture and serves as a model for scholars in
109 2014 BOOK REVIEWS other regions. Te book is quite simply beautiful; from the stunning photographyto the detailed drawings and illustrations, it exceeds production values associated with award-winning cof ee-table volumes. Te hundreds of color and black-and-white photographs and line drawings bring the subject matter to life. T e editors have done a masterful job of creating consistency and readability without extin-guishing the individual authors’ voices. A minor critique is that the second half of the book, which focuses on the physical evidence, gets quite technical; a glossary would have been helpful for nonprofessional readers.Te editors and authors are to be congratulated on an exemplary piece of scholarship. Tey have crafted a signifcant volume on the Chesapeake’s built environment that will serve scholars for years to come. University of Maryland Donald W. Linebaugh Crossroads of Empire: Te Middle Colonies in British North America. By Ned C.Landsman. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. 254 pp. Illus-trations, notes, bibliographic essay, index. Cloth, $45; paper, $25.) Tis concise overview of the middle colonies as a unifed region of majorimportance to colonial British North America will be extremely useful to spe-cialists and can also be effectively assigned in undergraduate courses. NedLandsman, wielding a graceful pen, draws on a thorough understanding of the re-gion’s scholarship to ofer balanced judgments throughout this persuasive work of synthesis. Te three opening chapters explore the native and non-English origins of the middle colonies and the proprietary circumstances of the Duke of York and Penn’s regimes; the four remaining chapters present the region at the crossroads of commerce, religious and ethnic diversity, philosophy and faith, and politics.Te author repeatedly employs comparisons and contrasts between individuals,groups, and movements—e.g., James Stuart and William Penn, Dutch and Scots settlers, evangelicalism and the Enlightenment, Benjamin Franklin and George Whitefeld—to adroitly balance specifc details and broad generalizations.Although the book is a short work on a subject that demands substantialgeographic and chronological breadth, it gives serious attention tovaried native nations, women, struggles over colonial colleges, and European influences. Landsman does not just address important seventeenth-centuryEnglish political developments for the middle colonies but also provides richinsights about the Netherlands, Scotland, and Ulster. His careful writing, which eschews hyperbole, helps him to argue efectively for the signifcance of theregion at the center of British North America and as a precursor for later major social developments. Te book further makes an argument about the importance of chronology: “It was the emergence of the Middle Colonies as a commercial