Woodslane | Book - 9780801898266

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Buying into the World of Goods:

Early Consumers in Backcountry Virginia

ISBN-13: 9780801898266
Publisher: JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
Imprint: JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
By Ann Smart Martin
Price: AUD $64.99
Stock: 0 in stock
Availability: This book is temporarily out of stock, order will be despatched as soon as fresh stock is received.
Local release date: 14/10/2010
Format: Paperback 288 pages Weight: 0g
Categories: History of the Americas [HBJK]

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How did people living on the early American frontier discover and then become a part of the market economy? How do their purchases and their choices revise our understanding of the market revolution and the emerging consumer ethos? Ann Smart Martin provides answers to these questions by examining the texture of trade on the edge of the upper Shenandoah Valley between 1760 and 1810. Reconstructing the world of one country merchant, John Hook, Martin reveals how the acquisition of consumer goods created and validated a set of ideas about taste, fashion, and lifestyle in a particular place at a particular time. Her analysis of Hook's account ledger illuminates the everyday wants, transactions, and tensions recorded within and brings some of Hook's customers to life: a planter looking for just the right clock, a farmer in search of nails, a young woman and her friends out shopping on their own, and a slave woman choosing a looking glass. This innovative approach melds fascinating narratives with sophisticated analysis of material culture to distill large abstract social and economic systems into intimate triangulations among merchants, customers, and objects. Martin finds that objects not only reflect culture, they are the means to create it.

Series Editor's Foreword
Preface
Introduction: In Backcountry Time
1. The Business of Revolutions: John Hook and the Atlantic World
William Mead's Scottish Clock
2. Getting the Goods: Local Acquisition in a Tobacco Economy
The Iron Plate
3. Accounting for Life: Objects, Names, and Numbers
The Ledger
4. Living the Backcountry: Styles and Standards
The Wade Cabin in Backcountry Time
5. Setting the Stage, Playing the Part: Stores as Shopping Spaces
Ribbons of Desire
6. Suckey's Looking Glass: African Americans as Consumers
Mirrors and Meanings
Epilogue: Country Gentleman in a New Country: John Hook's Beef
Notes
Essay on Sources
Index

""An impressive example of what thinking in multidisciplinary ways about the uses and meaning of material culture can reveal about past lives... Martin has melded several approaches to her subject to great effect, and this work will be incredibly useful not only to those interested in the eighteenth-century Virginia backcountry, but also to any historical scholar who wishes to understand consumerism and its relationship to things and individual identity.""

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Buying into the World of Goods:

Early Consumers in Backcountry Virginia