Nestled between the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean, and stretching from Hampton Roads to Assateague Island, Virginia's Eastern Shore is a distinctly southern place with an exceptionally southern taste. In this inviting narrative, Bernard L. Herman welcomes readers into the communities, stories, and flavors that season a land where the distance from tide to tide is often less than five miles. Blending personal observation, history, memories of harvests and feasts, and recipes, Herman tells of life along the Eastern Shore through the eyes of its growers, watermen, oyster and clam farmers, foragers, church cooks, restaurant owners, and everyday residents. Four centuries of encounter, imagination, and invention continue to shape the foodways of the Eastern Shore of Virginia, melding influences from Indigenous peoples, European migrants, enslaved and free West Africans, and more recent newcomers. Herman reveals how local ingredients and the cooks who have prepared them for the table have developed a distinctly American terroir--the flavors of a place experienced through its culinary and storytelling traditions. This terroir flourishes even as it confronts challenges from climate change, declining fish populations, and farming monoculture. Herman reveals this resilience through the recipes and celebrations that hold meaning, not just for those who live there but for all those folks who sit at their tables--and other tables near and far.

From the eighteenth-century single-room "mansions" of Delaware's Cypress Swamp district to the early twentieth-century suburban housing around Philadelphia and Wilmington, the architectural landscape of the mid-Atlantic region is both rich and varied. In this pioneering field guide to the region's historic vernacular architecture, Gabrielle Lanier and Bernard Herman describe the remarkably diverse building traditions that have overlapped and influenced one another for generations.

With more than 300 illustrations and photographs, "Everyday Architecture of the Mid-Atlantic" explores the character of pre-1940 domestic and agricultural buildings in the towns and rural landscapes of southern New Jersey, Delaware, and coastal Maryland and Virginia. Approaching their subject "archaeologically," the authors examine the "layers" of a structure's past to show how it has changed over time and to reveal telling details about its occupants and the community in which they lived. The book provides architectural information as well as a working methodology for anyone wanting to explore and learn from traditional architecture and landscapes.

The authors conclude that, as a vital cultural artifact, the distinctive architecture of the mid-Atlantic needs to be identified, recorded, and preserved. "Everyday Architecture of the Mid-Atlantic" gives proof to the insights architecture offers into who we are culturally as a community, a region, and a nation.

Ronald Lockett (1965-1998) stands out among southern artists in the late twentieth century. Raised in the African American industrial city of Bessemer, Alabama, Lockett explored a range of recurring themes through his art: faith, the endless cycle of life, environmental degradation, historical events, the sweetness of idealized love, mourning, human emotion, and personal struggle. By the time Lockett died at age thirty-two, he had created an estimated four hundred works that document an extraordinary artistic evolution. This book offers the first in-depth critical treatment of Lockett's art, alongside sixty full-color plates of the artist's paintings and assemblages, shedding light on Lockett's career and work. By placing Lockett at its center, contributors contextualize what might be best understood as the Birmingham-Bessemer School of art, which includes Thornton Dial, Joe Minter, and Lonnie Holley, and its turbulent social, economic, and personal contexts. While broadening our understanding of southern contemporary art, Fever Within uncovers how one artist's work has become emblematic of the frustrated, yearning, unredeemed promises, and family and community resilience expressed by a generation of African American artists at the close of the twentieth century. Contributors include Paul Arnett, Sharon Patricia Holland, Katherine L. Jentleson, Thomas J. Lax, and Colin Rhodes.

In this abundantly illustrated volume, Bernard Herman provides a history of urban dwellings and the people who built and lived in them in early America. In the eighteenth century, cities were constant objects of idealization, often viewed as the outward manifestations of an organized, civil society. As the physical objects that composed the largest portion of urban settings, town houses contained and signified different aspects of city life, argues Herman. Taking a material culture approach, Herman examines urban domestic buildings from Charleston, South Carolina, to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, as well as those in English cities and towns, to better understand why people built the houses they did and how their homes informed everyday city life. Working with buildings and documentary sources as diverse as court cases and recipes, Herman interprets town houses as lived experience. Chapters consider an array of domestic spaces, including the merchant family's house, the servant's quarter, and the widow's dower. Herman demonstrates that city houses served as sites of power as well as complex and often conflicted artifacts mapping the everyday negotiations of social identity and the display of sociability.

In this beautifully illustrated volume, published in celebration of the Renwick Gallery's fortieth anniversary, author Nicholas Bell highlights forty artists (all under the age of forty) actively engaged in creating objects that are transforming contemporary craft. 40 Under 40 investigates evolving notions of craft within traditional media such as ceramics and metalwork, as well as in fields as varied as sculpture, industrial design, installation art, fashion, and sustainable manufacturing. Viewing craft's heritage as a set of flexible tools rather than a rigid structure, Bell shows how this exciting group of young artists has produced work that not only breaks boundaries, but also uses an expanded conceptual framework, establishing craft's important role in the world of contemporary art and culture today. Distributed for the Smithsonian American Art Museum Exhibition Schedule: Smithsonian American Art Museum(07/20/12-02/3/13)

Spanning the North Atlantic rim from Canada to Scotland, and from the Caribbean to the coast of West Africa, the British Atlantic world is deeply interconnected across its regions. In this groundbreaking study, thirteen leading scholars explore the idea of transatlanticism-or a shared ""Atlantic world"" experience-through the lens of architecture and built spaces in the British Atlantic world from the seventeenth century through the mid-nineteenth century. Examining town planning, churches, forts, merchants' stores, state houses, and farm houses, this collection shows how the powerful visual language of architecture and design allowed the people of this era to maintain common cultural experiences while still forming their individuality. By studying the interplay between physical construction and social themes that include identity, gender, taste, domesticity, politics, and race, the authors interpret material culture in a way that particularly emphasizes the people who built, occupied, and used the spaces and reflects the complex cultural exchanges between Britain and the New World.