LAUSR

Carl R. Lounsbury. Essays in Early American Architectural History: A View from the Chesapeake Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011, 268 pp., 136 b/w illus. $38.50 (paper), ISBN 9780813932293 This collection of essays is an excellent example of the “new architectural history” that has been practiced during the past forty years by most scholars of American architecture, especially those focusing on the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. This new architectural history was at first associated solely with scholars who studied vernacular architecture, but with the succeeding years, vernacular has become a broader term that also describes an approach to the study of architecture, regardless of a building's design origins or place in time. Although this approach to architectural history is no longer new, historians have yet to find a satisfactory term that describes the sea change that took place in the discipline during the last quarter of the twentieth century. In any case, the field of architectural history turned a corner and became the richer for it. This approach can be traced to two seminal works of the 1970s—Henry Glassie's Folk Housing in Middle Virginia (1975) and Abbott Lowell Cummings's The Framed Houses of Massachusetts Bay, 1625–1725 (1979).1 Glassie, a folklorist, employed the theories of semiology to investigate the idea that buildings are the results of complex, culturally embedded signs and symbols. Like …