Furnishing the Eighteenth Century: What Furniture Can Tell Us About the European and American Past

Furnishing Eighteenth Century is a digital PDF collection of essays about European and American furniture during the eighteenth century. Edited by Dena Goodman and Kathryn Norberg, it is available as an instant download.

This volume examines furniture as evidence of social life, cultural exchange, fashion, taste, status, and domestic practice. Its contributors draw on literature, painting, account books, death inventories, and furniture collections.

The digital edition contains 262 pages in a PDF file sized at 8.7 MB.

Book Overview

Furnishing the Eighteenth Century: What Furniture Can Tell Us About the European and American Past presents twelve essays on the cultural and social history of eighteenth-century furniture. The collection brings together work by historians, art historians, and literary scholars.

Its scope extends across Europe and the Americas, with particular attention to England, France, the United States, colonial America, Saint-Domingue, Paris, and Dauphiné. The essays ask how furniture acquired meaning through trade, colonialism, race, gender, luxury, business, fashion, domestic arrangement, and rituals of power.

The book is arranged in four parts: “Mapping Meaning Globally,” “Diffusing Furniture, Fashion, Taste,” “Making Meaning in the Domestic Interior,” and “Forms, Functions, Meanings.” It includes bibliographical references, an index, contributors’ information, and seventy images noted in the acknowledgments.

What You’ll Discover Inside

• Orientalism, colonialism, and furniture in eighteenth-century France.
• Mahogany, status, race, and luxury in Saint-Domingue.
• Upholsterers’ shops, furniture commerce, fashion, and diffusion in Paris.
• Provincial furnishing culture in the early American republic from 1790 to 1820.
• Color schemes, seriality, decoration, and spectatorship in European interiors.
• Tea tables, secrétaire furniture, secrecy, security, and rituals of power.
• The ways furniture reflects global contacts and social practices in the eighteenth-century past.

Why This Book Matters

This collection treats furniture as a source for cultural and social history rather than as decoration alone. Its essays connect ordinary and luxurious objects with the people who made, purchased, arranged, used, and interpreted them.

For students and researchers, the volume demonstrates how furniture can illuminate relationships among domestic life, public power, colonial exchange, gender, status, and changing ideas of taste. It is also relevant to readers studying decorative arts, design history, European history, American history, and historical interiors.

Book Details

Device Compatibility

This is a digital download, so no physical copy will be shipped. Access is available after purchase through the download provided by the marketplace.

The PDF works with appropriate Kindle apps, tablets, desktop computers, mobile devices, and compatible reading apps. Device features may vary by application.

FAQ

When can I access the book?
Access is available after purchase through the instant digital download.

Will I receive a physical book?
No. This product is a digital PDF download, with no physical shipping.

Which devices support the file?
You can read the PDF with appropriate Kindle apps, tablets, desktop computers, mobile devices, or reading apps.

Download Furnishing the Eighteenth Century for focused study of furniture, domestic interiors, and eighteenth-century European and American history.

Verified Bibliographic Details