Expert, illustrated hands-on guide enables even beginners to make 24 authentic pieces: butter churn table, pedestal table, apothecary chest, deacons' bench, dry sink, hutch, more. Exploded drawings help visualize construction. Detailed instructions plus advice on wood, gluing and clamping, finishing, hardware, more. 74 black-and-white illustrations.

This excellent how-to book provides woodworkers with all the information and instructions they need to construct accurate and beautiful replicas of such attractive pieces as a drop-lid desk, pine dresser, wing chair, butterfly trestle table, paneled chest, bookcases, and other authentic replicas. Over 300 illustrations.

This book presents new information on the export trade, patronage, artistic collaboration, and the small-scale shop traditions that defined early Rhode Island craftsmanship. This stunning volume features more than 200 illustrations of beautifully constructed and carved objects—including chairs, high chests, bureau tables, and clocks—that demonstrate the superb workmanship and artistic skill of the state’s furniture makers.

Step-by-step instructions for amateur craftsmen at home and industrial arts students in schools.

A study of the furniture-makers, social structure, household possessions and surviving pieces of furniture of two neighbouring New England communities. Drawing on documentary and artifactual sources, the author explores the interplay among producer, process and style in demonstrating why and how the social economies of these two seemingly similar towns differed significantly during the late colonial and early national periods.

"In this clearly written volume, Hawke provides enlightening and colorful descriptions of early Colonial Americans and debunks many widely held assumptions about 17th century settlers."--Publishers Weekly

Most historians rely principally on written sources. Yet there are other traces of the past available to historians: the material things that people have chosen, made, and used. This book examines how material culture can enhance historians' understanding of the past, both worldwide and across time. The successful use of material culture in history depends on treating material things of many kinds not as illustrations, but as primary evidence. Each kind of material thing-and there are many-requires the application of interpretive skills appropriate to it. These skills overlap with those acquired by scholars in disciplines that may abut history but are often relatively unfamiliar to historians, including anthropology, archaeology, and art history. Creative historians can adapt and apply the same skills they honed while studying more traditional text-based documents even as they borrow methods from these fields. They can think through familiar historical problems in new ways. They can also deploy material culture to discover the pasts of constituencies who have left few or no traces in written records. The authors of this volume contribute case studies arranged thematically in six sections that respectively address the relationship of history and material culture to cognition, technology, the symbolic, social distinction, and memory. They range across time and space, from Paleolithic to Punk.

Superb, step-by-step guide enables even beginners to build heirloom pieces by Hepplewhite, Chippendale, Phyfe, and other masters. Detailed, precise construction drawings, measurements. Full instructions. Over 500 illustrations.

New Perspectives on Boston Furniture gathers together nineteen essays first delivered at the Winterthur Museum’s 2013 Furniture Forum. It amply illustrates how research concerning one of America’s most productive centers of furniture-making has diversified in the forty years since the Colonial Society of Massachusetts published Boston Furniture of the Eighteenth Century (also distributed by Virginia), the proceedings of a similar conference held in 1973. The essays place less emphasis on connoisseurship and instead devote greater attention to techniques of construction and the social uses to which these objects were put. The roster of contributors includes not only some of the best-known names in the field (Edwin S. Cooke Jr., Wendy A. Cooper, J. Ritchie Garrison, Morrison Heckscher, Robert Mussey, and Richard Nylander) but also a number of skilled furniture makers and emerging scholars. Some of the subjects addressed include the construction of turret-top tea and card tables, japaning techniques, how pigeonholes functioned as a record-keeping device for merchants, and the making of Windsor and "elastic" chairs. A particular strength of the volume is that it carries the examination of Boston furniture forward into the understudied nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with essays on piano making, the Grecian furniture of Isaac Vose, the frames and mirrors of John Doggett, and the furniture making of the east Cambridge firm of Ellis & Davenport, who did so much to satisfy demand for Colonial Revival furniture in the half century following the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876. Distributed for the Colonial Society of Massachusetts