Novels, Needleworks, and Empire

Novels, Needleworks, and Empire PDF

Author: Chloe Wigston Smith

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2024-03-12

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 0300277725

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The first sustained study of the vibrant links between domestic craft and British colonialism In the eighteenth century, women’s contributions to empire took fewer official forms than those collected in state archives. Their traces were recorded in material ways, through the ink they applied to paper or the artifacts they created with muslin, silk threads, feathers, and shells. Handiwork, such as sewing, knitting, embroidery, and other crafts, formed a familiar presence in the lives and learning of girls and women across social classes, and it was deeply connected to colonialism. Chloe Wigston Smith follows the material and visual images of the Atlantic world that found their way into the hands of women and girls in Britain and early America—in the objects they made, the books they held, the stories they read—and in doing so adjusted and altered the form and content of print and material culture. A range of artifacts made by women, including makers of color, brought the global into conversation with domestic crafts and consequently placed images of empire and colonialism within arm’s reach. Together, fiction and handicrafts offer new evidence of women’s material contributions to the home’s place within the global eighteenth century, revealing the rich and complex connections between the global and the domestic.

Novels, Needleworks, and Empire

Novels, Needleworks, and Empire PDF

Author: Chloe Wigston Smith

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2024-03-12

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 030027078X

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The first sustained study of the vibrant links between domestic craft and British colonialism In the eighteenth century, women's contributions to empire took fewer official forms than those collected in state archives. Their traces were recorded in material ways, through the ink they applied to paper or the artifacts they created with muslin, silk threads, feathers, and shells. Handiwork, such as sewing, knitting, embroidery, and other crafts, formed a familiar presence in the lives and learning of girls and women across social classes, and it was deeply connected to colonialism. Chloe Wigston Smith follows the material and visual images of the Atlantic world that found their way into the hands of women and girls in Britain and early America--in the objects they made, the books they held, the stories they read--and in doing so adjusted and altered the form and content of print and material culture. A range of artifacts made by women, including makers of color, brought the global into conversation with domestic crafts and consequently placed images of empire and colonialism within arm's reach. Together, fiction and handicrafts offer new evidence of women's material contributions to the home's place within the global eighteenth century, revealing the rich and complex connections between the global and the domestic.

The Fabric of Empire

The Fabric of Empire PDF

Author: Danielle C. Skeehan

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press

Published: 2020-12-08

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 1421439689

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Bringing together methods and materials traditionally belonging to literary studies, book history, and material culture studies, The Fabric of Empire provides a new model for thinking about the different media, languages, literacies, and textualities in the early Atlantic world.

Material Literacy in 18th-Century Britain

Material Literacy in 18th-Century Britain PDF

Author: Serena Dyer

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2020-09-03

Total Pages: 557

ISBN-13: 1501349627

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The eighteenth century has been hailed for its revolution in consumer culture, but Material Literacy in Eighteenth-Century Britain repositions Britain as a nation of makers. It brings new attention to eighteenth-century craftswomen and men with its focus on the material knowledge possessed not only by professional artisans and amateur makers, but also by skilled consumers. This edited collection gathers together a group of interdisciplinary scholars working in the fields of art history, history, literature, and museum studies to unearth the tactile and tacit knowledge that underpinned fashion, tailoring, and textile production. It invites us into the workshops, drawing rooms, and backrooms of a broad range of creators, and uncovers how production and tacit knowledge extended beyond the factories and machines which dominate industrial histories. This book illuminates, for the first time, the material literacies learnt, enacted, and understood by British producers and consumers. The skills required for sewing, embroidering, and the textile arts were possessed by a large proportion of the British population: men, women and children, professional and amateur alike. Building on previous studies of shoppers and consumption in the period, as well as narratives of manufacture, these essays document the multiplicity of small producers behind Britain's consumer revolution, reshaping our understanding of the dynamics between making and objects, consumption and production. It demonstrates how material knowledge formed an essential part of daily life for eighteenth-century Britons. Craft technique, practice, and production, the contributors show, constituted forms of tactile languages that joined makers together, whether they produced objects for profit or pleasure.

Defying Empire

Defying Empire PDF

Author: Thomas M. Truxes

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2008-11-18

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0300150431

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This enthralling book is the first to uncover the story of New York City merchants who engaged in forbidden trade with the enemy before and during the Seven Years’ War (also known as the French and Indian War). Ignoring British prohibitions designed to end North America’s wartime trade with the French, New York’s merchant elite conducted a thriving business in the French West Indies, insisting that their behavior was protected by long practice and British commercial law. But the government in London viewed it as treachery, and its subsequent efforts to discipline North American commerce inflamed the colonists.Through fast-moving events and unforgettable characters, historian Thomas M. Truxes brings eighteenth-century New York and the Atlantic world to life. There are spies, street riots, exotic settings, informers, courtroom dramas, interdictions on the high seas, ruthless businessmen, political intrigues, and more. The author traces each phase of the city’s trade with the enemy and details the frustrations that affected both British officials and independent-minded New Yorkers. The first book to focus on New York City during the Seven Years’ War, Defying Empire reveals the important role the city played in hastening the colonies’ march toward revolution.

Queering the Subversive Stitch

Queering the Subversive Stitch PDF

Author: Joseph McBrinn

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2021-04-08

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1472578066

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The history of men's needlework has long been considered a taboo subject. This is the first book ever published to document and critically interrogate a range of needlework made by men. It reveals that since medieval times men have threaded their own needles, stitched and knitted, woven lace, handmade clothes, as well as other kinds of textiles, and generally delighted in the pleasures and possibilities offered by all sorts of needlework. Only since the dawn of the modern age, in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, did needlework become closely aligned with new ideologies of the feminine. Since then men's needlework has been read not just as feminising but as queer. In this groundbreaking study Joseph McBrinn argues that needlework by male artists as well as anonymous tailors, sailors, soldiers, convalescents, paupers, prisoners, hobbyists and a multitude of other men and boys deserves to be looked at again. Drawing on a wealth of examples of men's needlework, as well as visual representations of the male needleworker, in museum collections, from artist's papers and archives, in forgotten magazines and specialist publications, popular novels and children's literature, and even in the history of photography, film and television, he surveys and analyses many of the instances in which “needlemen” have contested, resisted and subverted the constrictive ideals of modern masculinity. This audacious, original, carefully researched and often amusing study, demonstrates the significance of needlework by men in understanding their feelings, agency, identity and history.

The Second Carolingian Modelbook

The Second Carolingian Modelbook PDF

Author: Kim Salazar

Publisher:

Published: 2021-11

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9780997507652

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Meticulously researched and annotated, The Second Carolingian Modelbook is a pattern collection for stitchers fascinated by the counted embroidery styles of the 1500s and 1600s.Its 75 plates of over 250 individual band, border, strapwork, and field designs are clearly depicted for ease of working, and are accompanied by observations on pattern "families", full source documentation, and descriptions of some of the many techniques that were used to stitch them. It contains linear designs appropriate for double-running or back stitch embroidery; and block unit designs can be used for long armed cross stitch and darned whitework. Block unit designs can also be used in modern context for cross stitch, filet crochet, and knitting. Designs appropriate for reserva or voided work (the ancestor of modern Assisi stitching) are also included. Please note that this is a reference work for stitchers creating their own works for private use, and not a book of fully composed projects and the step by step directions for creating them.