| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

From Tavern to Courthouse: Architecture & Ritual in American Law, 1658–1860. By Martha J. McNamara. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. xviii, 162 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-8018-7395-9.)

Martha J. McNamara presents two related theses—architectural and professional—in the short space of 110 text pages and leaves this reader yearning for more. As the title suggests, she traces the development of courthouse architecture through much of the colonial and early national periods. The title, however, does not specify that McNamara has limited the subject of the book to Massachusetts nor, indeed, that her analysis is further limited to nine courthouses in four counties (Suffolk, Essex, Worcester, and Hampshire). According to her thesis, county court sessions in colonial Massachusetts were held in undifferentiated space in townhouses (seats of local government that provided merchant exchanges in an open first floor and town and county government space in the building above). But by 1830 county court and administrative functions were housed in "a bounded judicial space" of multiroom courthouse with adjacent prison complex, remote from the mercantile district. "These judicial landscapes provided Massachusetts lawyers with a stage upon which they could both define and represent themselves as a profession" (p. 57).

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