As America's first historical society, the Massachusetts Historical
Society has collected family materials since 1791, including
long-cherished pieces of clothing that were acquired alongside
papers such as letters and diaries. Because of the different
storage requirements for textiles and manuscripts, these
survivors-many of them hundreds of years old-have largely been
divorced from their familial ties. Fashioning the New England
Family, an initiative encompassing a fall 2018 exhibition and this
companion volume, reconnects the textiles with the associated
stories carried in the family papers. Generously illustrated with
full-color photographs of garments, fabrics, and accessories,
including exquisite detail shots, the book creates a lasting
overview of the exhibition but also delves into specific topics.
The chapters cover a spam of more than three hundred years, tracing
the history of New England clothing from the colonial seventeenth
century, through the Revolutionary eighteenth century, and into the
national nineteenth. In these pages, readers will find a fragment
of Mayflower passenger Priscilla Mullins Alden's dress; Governor
John Leverett's bloodstained buff coat, which saw battle in the
English Civil War; and the luxurious Spitalfields green silk damask
wedding dress and shoes that Rebecca Tailer Byles wore at her 1747
wedding in Boston. Across these examples and more, the text traces
patterns of global production and local consumption and reuse,
demonstrating how New Englanders used costume to establish their
situation, especially in terms of class and gender, and also to
express their political affiliations. Patriots and
loyalists-Hancocks, Adamses, Dawses, and Olivers-make many
appearances, as they are so well represented in the society's rich
holdings. Manuscripts drawn from the collections-receipts,
daybooks, account books, diaries-further amplify the historical
insights, even at times making it possible to interpret the way in
which a specific garment may have embodied one individual's sense
of identity. Distributed for the Massachusetts Historical Society.
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