| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Robert F. Dalzell, Jr. and Lee Baldwin Dalzell. George Washington's Mount Vernon: At Home in Revolutionary America. New York: Oxford University Press. 1998. Pp. xxi, 300. $35.00.

Robert F. Dalzell, Jr., and Lee Baldwin Dalzell attempt to show what George Washington's 8,000-acre plantation can reveal about his personal character. Their core premise is that his deeply held values and opinions were embedded in his artifactual environment. By looking at Washington through the lenses of material culture research, they try to suggest a connection between the way that he managed Mount Vernon and the way that he understood the nation. Writing, for example, about how Washington assembled the work force that he needed to build his house, the Dalzells see parallels with the concerns that also troubled the country: "When fully assembled, the building crews at Mount Vernon thus had a polyglot character. Indeed, they came close to replicating, in miniature, the larger Virginia society from which they were drawn. They also displayed, sometimes dramatically, the pressures and tensions that eddied through society" (p. 127). Here the Dalzells are following the axiomatic premise of anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn, who held that cultural performance serves the analyst as a "mirror for mankind." In a similar way, the authors argue that Washington is effectively mirrored in Mount Vernon. . . .

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