Reviewed by Wayne Bodle | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.3

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Reviewed by Wayne Bodle | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.3 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Wayne Bodle, Indiana University of Pennsylvania

The Delaware Valley in the Early Republic: Architecture, Landscape, and Regional Identity. By Gabrielle M. Lanier. Creating the North American Landscape. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. 250 pages. $46.95 (cloth).
The Middle Atlantic region may be the Fermat's Last Theorem of early American historiography, or, more prosaically, its Rubik's Cube: a problem tantalizingly apparent in the literature, obviously important and ripe for interpretation, yet one that routinely defies synthetic description, much less definitive analysis. Academic accounts typically begin with the area's diversity, multiplicity, and pluralism, whether ethnic, religious, or cultural. But such abstract attributes cannot match the unifying force of shared religious beliefs, crop systems, or labor regimes that more tangibly defined the regions that have bounded this one's elusive middleness. Scholars also invoke the region's acceptance, and even embrace, of competitive or conflictual political and economic practices. Yet traces of such phenomena were found at particular times and places north and south of the middle zone. Moreover, the logic of unbridled contest might have ultimately frayed an area into smaller dysfunctional fiefdoms, not integrated it into a coherent whole. Proponents of the Middle Atlantic claim that their champion, for all of its arguably nondescript character, survived to become a model for American modernity itself, whereas its more legible and definable neighbor regions, inscribed by Puritan divines and avaricious planters, withered away.	1
As the pages of the William and Mary Quarterly show, knowledge about the British colonial middle continues to pour forth, hardly waiting for this definitional or categorical project to achieve a satisfying conclusion. Typologies are engaging and spatial categories of analysis welcome, but neither are essential to productive scholarship. It has been an open secret among Middle Atlantic partisans that work set in the region thrives, even as some scholars struggle to capture its elusive character and meaning. Gabrielle M. Lanier's comparative study of three localities in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey applies to those places a range of extradisciplinary perspectives and methodologies, including architectural, material culture, landscape, and folklore approaches. She does not claim to deal with the entire Middle Atlantic region as it is conventionally defined. Instead, she focuses on the lower Delaware Valley, one of three major watersheds (with the Hudson and Susquehanna) that drained the area's interior. Nevertheless, she offers an insightful and honestly brokered review of the debates about regional character. Specialists may question her claim that they have "often persistently characterized the Delaware Valley monolithically" (5). The author's own fifteen pages of close analysis of this scholarship instead suggest that they have debated its every fold and wrinkle, acknowledging that the Middle Atlantic was the "least homogenous" (9) place and citing its "muted vagueness" (11), its "relative inconspicuousness" (15), or its lack of any "degree of definition" (19).	2
The heart of this book lies in three penetrating chapters on a Germanic society in Warwick Township, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania; a hard-pressed "marginal" (82) community in southern Delaware; and a remnant Quaker hearth in riverine Salem County, New Jersey. Lanier brings to her discussion of each place a set of analytical tools and strategies adapted to its contemporary character in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century and to the particular mix of material and documentary evidence that it left behind. Her choices are judicious and the resulting interpretations are imaginative. Scholars set in their ways about the virtues of particular kinds of evidence, whether probate inventories, tax records, or personal documents, should learn much from her deft mixing and matching of tools. One wonders, however, whether the specific juxtaposition of different kinds of analysis with particular subregional localities does not skew her conclusion toward exaggerating the region's kaleidoscopic fragmentation, as much as previous accounts are said to have overemphasized its monolithic character.	. . .

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