| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Shawn Michelle Smith. American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1999. Pp. xi, 299. Cloth $55.00, paper $19.95.

This book by Shawn Michelle Smith analyzes the multiplicity and interconnectedness of nineteenth-century representations of class, gender, and race. The book ambitiously tracks these themes across diverse media. As the author explains, she includes "popular, literary, artistic, and scientific discourses that called upon photographs to make claims upon identity" as well as "photographs themselves" (p. 7). To discuss such a variety of topics and media, the trade-off is the unity of the narrative. 1

Nathaniel Hawthorne's House of Seven Gables (1851) does double duty introducing Smith's argument. In the first chapter, she analyzes this "romance of middle-class ascendence" (p. 19) to illustrate that nineteenth-century female submissiveness and middle-class "interiority" replaced the Puritan ancestors' aristocratic "exteriority." The second chapter sees Hawthorne's critique of "blood purity" as parallel to the "conceits of blood purity, heredity, and inherited character [that] were rapidly becoming the categories of 'race' that most fascinated white middle-class Americans" (p. 28). Smith then discusses "biological racialists," who worked to define race as a fixed category used to justify discrimination and even slavery. . . .

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