| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Nora Pat Small. Beauty and Convenience: Architecture and Order in the New Republic. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. 2003. Pp. xxiv, 155. $29.95.

Although characteristic of early nineteenth-century New England towns, the two-story, symmetric house with ell was widely misunderstood, asserts Nora Pat Small. Those houses were "too presumptuous for early republic reformers, not quaint enough for mid-century romantics, not old enough for late-nineteenth-century antiquarians, [and] not lavish enough for twentieth-century architectural historians" (p. 43). While this kind of house, commonly tagged a Federal, has been central to the region's picture-postcard image, its importance for Small lies in the spirited, three-cornered debate among contemporary moral reformers, architectural designers, and Yankee builders over its meaning. Her examination is premised on the belief that extant buildings, despite subsequent alterations, are primary documents whose meaning can be ascertained through fieldwork and archival research, the latter of which in her case primarily consisted of public records. Small persuasively fits her book into a budding cross disciplinary scholarship on vernacular New England first developed by Abbott Lowell Cummings, but then advanced by the likes of historical geographer Michael Steinitz and architectural historian Thomas C. Hubka.

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