| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Maurie D. McInnis. The Politics of Taste in Antebellum Charleston. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2005. Pp. ix, 395. $34.95.

Drawing rooms, public buildings, backlots, and slave yards come into sharp relief in this new analysis of the material culture of antebellum Charleston, South Carolina. Weaving together documentary sources mined by numerous other scholars of the slave South and sources examined by historians of art and architecture, Maurie D. McInnis presents a history of Charleston that "stands between" or "among several scholarly disciplines" (p. 8), among them anthropology, history, and art history. It is the cross-disciplinary nature of her approach that sets her work apart from more traditional histories of this much-studied city. In part, McInnis sets out to explain why the wealthiest women and men of Charleston built what they built and bought what they bought. As an historian of visual culture, she assumes that in making such decisions people reveal not merely their personalities and idiosyncrasies but also their political proclivities and worldviews. She draws on European scholarship in arguing that the city's elite expropriated artwork, architecture, and decorative art forms to "communicate and to mediate relationships" (p. 13) and to visually assert their mastery over slaves and lower-class whites, the supremacy of slavery over wage labor, and the primacy of southern slave society over the free labor North.

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