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Unless otherwise indicated, all Institute books are published and distributed by The University of North Carolina Press. For ordering information, call 1-800-848-6224 or fax 1-800-272-6817. Please note that these books can be only purchased through UNC Press and not through the Institute.

Bernard L. Herman

Cloth ISBN 0-8078-2991-9 $45.00
Paper ISBN $0.00

Copyright 2005 by The University of North Carolina Press

An Award-Winning Book

  Abbott Lowell Cummings Award, Vernacular Architecture Forum (2006)

Visit the University of North Carolina Press web page for this book.

“Town House is the first study to bring the methods of the new vernacular architectural history to the American city. Bernard Herman ranges far beyond architecture to people these houses, fill them with goods, set them next to their neighbors on the street, and link them to transatlantic predecessors and contemporaries. He shows us not only how these buildings were used, but what they meant to their residents. Town House is a tour de force of architectural and urban history—a book that we have long needed.”

“Herman’s latest book is the product of over a decade of research, spanning the Atlantic to encompass the major cities of the east coast of North America and England. This innovative and engaging assessment of a wide range of sources for the social and architectural history of town houses provides many new insights into material life in the North American and English city of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth century.”

“A thorough, imaginative, and persuasive reconstruction of the lived history of vernacular buildings in the early republic. Bernard Herman leads his readers through town houses of Charleston, Boston, Philadelphia, Norfolk, and Portsmouth, looking into attics and cellars as well as parlors and chambers, to explore who inhabited these buildings and what architecture meant to them. Deploying the evidence of probate, insurance, and tax records alongside building plans, travel narratives, and archeological digs, he situates town houses in their immediate communities and in a transatlantic culture.”

“Herman has fused the empirical density of wood, brick, and stone to a new kind of cultural history that focuses on how people—farmers, merchants, women, shipwrights, servants, and slaves—experienced urban life and shaped an everyday poetics of streets and back alleyways. Packed with wonderful discoveries from both fieldwork and the archive, Herman’s book weaves a web of connections from Charleston to Philadelphia to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and then to Bristol, Frome, Deptford, and Gravesend. It demonstrates, too, the subtlety of his narrative method, drawn from the utter interdependency of material artifacts and written documents. Town House will be required reading for a long time to come.”