Backyards are Front and Center in New Book
June 30, 2010
Michael Olmert's Kitchens, Smokehouses, and Privies: Outbuildings and the Architecture of Daily Life in the Eighteenth-Century Mid Atlantic is now available from Cornell University Press.
Aided by more than a hundred photographs, Michael Olmert's new book takes readers on a tour of the "the eighteenth-century backyards of colonial America." Olmert focuses on the greater Tidewater basin of Virginia and the Chesapeake watershed, with attention devoted to Williamsburg, Annapolis, Mount Vernon, Monticello, and other locations. Ninety of the black-and-white photographs included were shot by Olmert himself.
Olmert drew his inspiration for the book from the "ephemeral nature of these structures." Despite the lack of scholarly attention paid to outbuildings, Olmert seeks to uncover the history of their patterns of use, their folkore, and their literary presence. "[Kitchens, Smokehouses and Privies has] to do with social history and the material past, using evidence from archaelogy, architecture, literature, and art history," says Olmert.
"Olmert's book illuminates how the grand houses and also the more middling actually functioned in the Mid-Atlantic region. This books is essential for any serious student of Colonial America," says Richard Guy Wilson, author of Buildings of Virginia.
Olmert has a related article on the architecture and social history of eighteenth-century offices, which appeared in the Spring 2009 issue of Colonial Williamsburg. It is available online with additional pictures here.
Read an interview with Olmert on the New Yorker book blog "Ask An Academic" here.
Read more about Kitchens, Smokehouses, and Privies here.