| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

From Sacred to Secular: Visual Images in Early American Publications. By Barbara E. Lacey. (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007. 220 pp. $69.50, ISBN 978-0-87413-961-7.)

Barbara E. Lacey's From Sacred to Secular is an introduction to images printed in America before 1800 and a convincing argument for the use of visual resources in historical research. Using a wide variety of printed images, including broadsides, book frontispieces, illustrations, and prints, Lacey demonstrates how these sources can challenge and enrich our understanding of the past. The introduction and a brief appendix of eighteenth-century American engravers provide general information about the production of images and their circulation in early America. Nine thematic chapters engage topics such as Bible illustrations, images deployed for educational purposes, depictions of Indians, women, the American Revolution, portraits, and cityscapes. One of the book's strengths is its detailed analysis of sources, especially the author's sustained discussion of works such as the New England Primer and illustrations for the popular chapbook The Prodigal Daughter. In those passages Lacey is attentive to how word and image work together, reinforcing and sometimes contradicting each other. The text of The History of America, Abridged for the Use of Children of all Denominations (1795), for instance, depicts Indians as savage barbarians, yet its illustrations show them as dignified and peaceable. What early Americans made of those contradictions, however, the author leaves to her readers to decide.

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