1. State and local history is almost never available in the schools and, when available, usually reflects the initiative of individual teachers with a keen interest and a willingness to try something different. When recently contacted about the status of state and local history in secondary school curriculums, Luanne Sneddon of the American Association for State and Local History cited, “Junior Historical Society” programs run by the Indiana Historical Society and the New York Historical Association. The Texas Historical Commission recently produced A Teacher’s Companion, Activities and Resource Book (Austin, Tex.: Texas Historical Commission, 1994) to accompany its popular A Shared Experience, a published survey of the history, architecture, and historic sites between Laredo and Brownsville on the Rio Grand.

2. Wendell Berry, A Continuous Harmony (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1972), pp. 63–70.

3. Early Western art critics and travel writers marveled at Japan’s sense of history and reverence for craft. Art reform critic and aesthetic designer Christopher Dresser described the importance of Shinto, the traditional state religion, in keeping “alive a sense of gratitude” in Japan: Its Architecture, Art and Art Manufacturers (1882; reprint, New York: Garland Publishing, 1977), p. 230. Legendary Japanophile, antiquarian, and collector Edward S. Morse of Salem, Massachusetts, wrote of the importance of collecting among Japanese nobility, citing centuries-old family collections of pottery, swords, brocade, and “roofing tiles” passed down with reverence, generation after generation, in Japan, Day by Day (1917; reprint, Dunwoodly, Ga.: Norman S. Berg, 1978), pp. 106–7; Morse further described a renowned Japanese antiquarian who “held it to be a solemn duty to learn any art or accomplishment that might be going out of the world, and then describe it so fully, that it might be preserved to posterity” in Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings (1886; reprint, Rutland, Vt.: Charles E. tuttle, 1972), p. xxxi. In Japan, antiquarianism is connected with the ancient rituals of the tea ceremony and “tea culture” (Richard L. Wilson, “Tea Taste in the Era of Japonisme: A Debate,” Chanoyo Quarterly 50 [1988]: 23–39). State and local historical societies were the pioneer institutional antiques collectors. The Massachusetts Historical Society has collected paintings and antiques since the time of its founding in 1791 (see Witness to America’s Past: Two Centuries of Collecting by the Massachusetts Historical Society [Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1991]). The oldest continuously operated museum in the United States, Pilgrim Hall (founded 1820) has always concentrated on art and antiques. Elizabeth Stillinger’s The Antiquers (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980), gave less attention to the earliest collectors and failed to mention legendary figures like George Sheldon of Deerfield (see Suzanne L. Flynt, Susan McGowan, and Amelia F. Miller, Gathered and Preserved [Deerfield, Mass.: Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, 1991]) and Thomas Robbins of Hartford (see Robert F. Trent, “Thomas Robbins and Early Antiquarianism in New England,” lecture at the 1994 Winterthur Conference on “Perceptions of the Past: Private Collections/Public Collections,” [publication forthcoming]). These men—staunch regionalists all—were giants who layed the foundation for the work that followed. Stillinger profiled a few pioneer antiquarians such as the Rev. William Bentley (1759–1819) of Salem, “who collected a variety of things related to the history of Essex County”; John Fanning Watson (1779–1860) of Philadelphia, whose “study of colonial customs in his area” involved pioneering efforts at oral history, collecting antiques, and designing “relic furniture”; and Cummings Davis (1816–1896) of Concord, Massachusetts, whose “extraordinarily rich collection of the antiques of Concord” is the core of the Concord Antiquarian Museum (recently renamed The Concord Museum) (Stillinger, The Antiquers, pp. 17, 19, 22). The notion of “civic mission” is used by urban museums to describe service programs for and about the city or region where the museum is located. Although the priority given to the museums’ “global artistic mission” is typically undeclared, it plays out in the quest to be artistically correct and typically involves buying and exhibiting artists, both living and dead but never local, who have been vetted by the professional (and predominately commercial) networks devoted to such things. In 1993, I delivered a paper for the closing ceremony of Historic Deerfield’s Summer Fellowship Program on “The Role of Museums in Creating and Fostering Civic Identity.” I argued the importance of the role museums have to play in preserving “authenticity of experience” and “a sense of place in the face of an astonishing assault by our nation’s commercial popular culture.” What is indigenous or distinctive—a locale’s history, industries, and art, for example—is the only thing most places can still claim as their own. Although regional knowledge is not based entirely on indigenous stories and things, a place without them is unlikely to maintain or develop a strong or very durable identity or economy.
4. Stillinger, The Antiquers, pp. 69–81, 88–94, 133–41, 155–70, 174–75. Although Stillinger’s story downplays the importance of the early antiquarians and overlooks entirely the regional motive behind their work, the generation that followed also included regionalists. These “pioneer museum men” included Irving W. Lyon (1840–1896) and Henry Wood Erving (1851–1941) of Hartford, best remembered for “discovering” and naming the “Hadley chest”; A. T. Clearwater (1848–1933), the man most responsible for discovering the importance of New York silver; George Dudley Seymour (1859–1945), renowned for building the first collection of Connecticut furniture and as a relentless champion for Connecticut patriot Nathan Hale; Henry Watson Kent (1866–1948), who arrived at the Metropolitan Museum of Art via Norwich, Connecticut, the place he credited with solidifying “his love of the American past”; and Albert Hastings Pitkin (1852–1917), best known for his studies of regional pottery.

5. “A Cabinet-Maker’s Cabinet-Maker: Notes on Thomas Sheraton, 1751–1806,” Antiques 1, no. 1 (January 1922): 25–30. Homer Eaton Keyes, “Antiques Speaks for Itself,” ibid., p. 7.
6. Clair Franklin Luther, The Hadley Chest (Hartford, Conn.: Case, Lockwood & Brainard Co., 1935). Luther was minister of the Second Congregational Church in Amherst, Massachusetts, a daughter town to Hadley. Three Centuries of Connecticut Furniture (Hartford, Conn.: Morgan Memorial, Wadsworth Atheneum, 1935). This exhibition was conceived and carried out by Hartford’s legendary antiquarian-collectors—notably, William B. Goodwin, William Putnam, Morgan Bulkeley, Morgan Brainard, and Henry W. Erving—and the catalogue was written by New York attorney, Luke Vincent Lockwood, whose lifelong love of antiques was inspired by Henry Erving while Lockwood attended Trinity College in Hartford. Kirk J. Nelson’s “Foreward” in Raymond E. Barlow and Joan E. Kaiser, The Glass Industry in Sandwich (Windham, N.H.: Barlow-Kaiser Publishing Co., 1993), pp. vii–ix, explains how Sandwich glass was initially used to promote Cape Cod tourism. Albert Sack, Fine Points of Furniture (New York: Crown Publishers, 1950). In his preface, legendary antiques dealer Israel Sack wrote: “The idea which some people have—that antiques are valuable merely because of their age—is wrong. No matter how old a piece may be, it has no value unless it is of good quality. . . . Of prime consideration are the quality of the article, the design and the maker, the fineness and durability of the woods, and the mellowness imparted to them by a hundred or more years of natural wear.”

7. In an April 3, 1979, lecture at Winterthur, Brock Jobe, who was curator of Exhibition Buildings at Colonial Williamsburg, described John Graham as “a decorator” who set out to “acquire great objects and didn’t care if documentation got in the way.” The earliest attempt to furnish accurately a period room was Ivor Noël Hume’s “traveler’s” room in the Anderson House (Conversation with Graham Hood, January 1, 1995), but it was not until Hood’s arrival in early 1971 that the “old decorator tradition” began to give way to historic documentation. The Brush-Everard House, Raleigh Tavern, and Geddy House were the first properties to undergo major refurnishing; however, the greatest challenge involved refurnishing the Governor’s Palace—a veritable cultural icon. The Governor’s Palace is the signature building in the restoration and the most popular destination for museum visitors. Efforts to introduce historical accuracy in a building that epitomized Williamsburg’s role as tastemaker were amply chronicled in a special edition of Colonial Williamsburg Today 3, no. 3 (spring 1981) and in Michael Olmert, “The New, No-Frills Williamsburg,” Historic Preservation 37, no. 5 (October 1985): 27–33. Response was not always supportive. One long-time supporter described the restored buildings as “gloomy,” and at one point the administration received several letters of complaint per week. The Foundation responded with a candid, polite letter explaining the value of change and how John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s original intent was for Colonial Williamsburg to remain the leader in research pertaining to the town. As curator John Sands explains it (interview December 22, 1994), Colonial Williamsburg recognized that it was tampering with an icon cherished for reasons unrelated to the staff’s quest for historical authenticity and that some people would never accept the change. C. Knight, “Elegance Underground: The DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Gallery, Williamsburg, Virginia,” Architecture 75, no. 1 (January 1986): 52–55. “The New DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Gallery at Colonial Williamsburg,” Antiques 128, no. 4 (October 1985): 266–69.

8. Jane C. Nylander, Our Own Snug Fireside: Images of the New England Fireside, 1760–1860 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), is arguably the best recent example of what I call the “new antiquarianism.” Simply put, I believe that “material culture,” the banner under which revisionists attempted to unseat “the decorative arts” as the reigning ideology behind object study, failed to evolve into a program that followers could grasp or care for. The conflict at the heart of material culture and the decorative arts is, perhaps, best summarized by Michael J. Ettema’s controversial article, “History, Nostalgia, and American Furniture,” Winterthur Portfolio 17, nos. 2/3 (summer/autumn 1982), 135–44, and by the unprecedented outpouring of commentary from colleagues and professionals (see Winterthur Portfolio 17, no. 4 (winter 1982): 259–67. Ettema had little good to say about furniture studies or the decorative arts, and he was also critical of what he called “scientific antiquarianism” and the “antiquarian tradition.” He was searching for a program where objects are “used to enhance our understanding of history” rather than the other way around. I like to think of what I do as “object-based history,” not “art history,” recalling years ago a conversation with an art historian who preferred to be called a “professor of the history of art.” It is an important distinction. The merging of object study (involving connoisseurship) with social history is what “new antiquarians” do and, I believe, what antiquarians have always done to the limits of their ability and resources. Imagine Darret B. and Anita H. Rutman’s brilliant but visually challenged A Place in Time: Middlesex County, Virginia 1650–1750 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1984) with a dollop of object knowledge, or imagine an illustrated version of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812 (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), and you begin to see visually rich, human narrative the equal or better of film in communicative power. In addition to Jane Nylander’s work, Richard Bushman’s The Refinement of America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992); Elisabeth D. Garrett’s At Home: The American Family, 1750–1870 (New York: Harry Abrams, 1990); and several of the marvelous and underexposed exhibition catalogues produced by the staff at the Margaret Woodbury Strong Museum in Rochester, New York, show what is possible when object knowledge and documentary resources are deftly deployed with the aim of rendering the past. Ultimately, this work is either that of gifted generalists or teams of collaborating specialists, hence it flourishes outside the academy where the tradition of scrupulously segregated fields of study continues to suppress the kind of multidisciplinary work that I regard as essential to the task of rendering the past or even rendering American furniture as more than “superficial and decorative.” John T, Kirk, “Source of Some American Regional Furniture,” Antiques 88, no. 6 (December 1965): 790–97.

9. John T. Kirk with Henry Maynard, Connecticut Furniture: Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Hartford, Conn.: Wadsworth Atheneum, 1967); John T. Kirk, American Chairs: Queene Anne and Chippendale (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972). In American Chairs, Kirk broke new ground by abstracting the writings of pioneer American linguist, Hans Kurath (see his Handbook of the Linguistic Geography of New England [Providence, R.I.: Brown University, 1939]). Kurath’s analysis of linguistic subregions was thought to parallel the material culture regions of New England. Basically, the notion that culture is fluid, not always respecting political boundaries and certainly neither monolithic or “derivative,” was ably conveyed by Kurath’s pathbreaking research. The possibilities inherent in Kirk’s analogy with object study still merit further investigation. John T. Kirk, American Furniture and the British Tradition to 1830 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), pp. 3–6; John T. Kirk, “American Furniture in an International Context,” in Perspectives on American Furniture, edited by Gerald W. R. Ward (New York: W.W. Norton for the Winterthur Museum, 1988), pp. 39–62.

10. “Country Furniture: A Symposium,” Antiques 62, no. 4 (March 1968): 333–71.

11. Charles F. Montgomery, “Country Furniture,” Antiques 62, no. 4 (March 1968): 355-59. Kirk with Maynard, Connecticut Furniture, p. xiv; Kirk, “American Regional Furniture,” p. 798.

12. The passages cited are from E. McClung Fleming, “Foreward,” and Charles F. Hummel, “The Dominys of East Hampton, Long Island, and Their Furniture,” both in Country Cabinetwork and Simple City Furniture, edited by John D. Morse (Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia for the Winterthur Museum, 1970), pp. xi, 67. The conference took place March 27–29, 1969, a year after the Antiques issue on “country furniture” and after the tumultuous Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Country Cabinetwork was originally billed as a conference on “less sophisticated furniture.” Winterthur Newsletter 15, no. 3 (March/April 1969): 5. Wendell D. Garrett, “The Matter of Consumer’s Taste,” Winterthur Newsletter 15, no. 3 (March/April 1969): 210. To me and to several of the conference participants (cited in the transcription of the post-lecture roundtable discussions, p. 281), the most intriguing idea in Garrett’s essay was the notion of “artisan mannerism,” a phenomenon not fully developed in the essay or in the other associated papers. Garrett’s emphasis on social context and labor history, witnessed in the citing of then au courant revisionist literature, such as Barton J. Bernstein’s, Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History (New York: Pantheon Books, 1968), helped move the emphasis from issues of place to issues of politics
and class.

13. Henry D. Green, Furniture of the Georgian Piedmont Before 1830 (Atlanta: High Museum of Art, 1976); Robert E. Winters Jr., ed., North Carolina Furniture 1700–1900 (Raleigh: North Carolina Museum of History, 1977); Robert F. Trent with Nancy Lee Nelson, “New London County Joined Chairs, 1720–1790,” Connecticut Historical Society Bulletin 50, no. 4 (fall 1985); James R. Melchor, N. Gordon Lohr, and Marilyn S. Melchor, Raised-Panel Cupboards of the Eastern Shore of Virginia (Norfolk, Va.: Chrysler Museum, 1982); Dean F. Failey, Long Island Is My Nation: The Decorative Arts and Craftsmen, 1640–1830 (Setauket, N.Y.: Society for the Preservation of Long Island Antiquities, 1976); E. Jane Connell and Charles R. Muller, “Ohio Furniture 1788–1888,” Antiques 125, no. 2 (February 1984): 462–68; Edwin A. Churchill and Sheila McDonald, “Reflections of Their World: The Furniture of the Upper St. John Valley, 1820–1930,” in Ward, ed., Perspectives on American Furniture, pp. 63–92. Since 1975, the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts’s Journal of Early Southern Decorative Arts has been the leading forum for scholarship on southern antiquities. Scott T. Swank et al., Arts of the Pennsylvania Germans (New York: W.W. Norton for the Winterthur Museum, 1983); and Roderic H. Blackburn and Ruth Piwonka, Remembrance of Patria: Dutch Arts and Culture in Colonial America, 1609–1776 (Albany, N.Y.: Albany Institute of History and Art, 1988).

14. Morrison H. Heckscher and Leslie Greene Bowman, American Rococo, 1750–1775: Elegance in Ornament (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992), p. xiii.

15. Robert Blair St. George, The Wrought Covenant: Source Materials for the Study of Craftsmen and Community in Southeastern New England, 1620–1700 (Brockton, Mass.: Brockton Art Center, 1979); and David Grayson Allen, In English Ways: The Movement of Societies and the Transferral of English Local Law and Custom to Massachusetts Bay in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1981). Jonathan L. Fairbanks and Robert F. Trent, eds., New England Begins: The Seventeenth Century, 3 vols. (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1982). Among the many valuable contributions made by this milestone exhibition, the idea that seventeenth-century New England was peopled by settlers who “transferred their entire culture to the New World, maintained strong ties with England, . . . and enjoyed a complex geometric, artificial, and colorful artistic style now called Mannerism” (p. xvii) now seems somewhat reductionist. Layering example upon example of “transferral” and dependence, New England Begins virtually ignored the possibility of invention. The one chapter that focused on furniture (Robert F. Trent, “New England Joinery and Turning before 1700,” pp. 501–50), although a brilliant analysis of craft and style, mostly illustrates objects that are emphatically derivative. Where Hadley chests are discussed (p. 529), the narrative trails off with a disclaimer that “it is impossible to suggest any exact origin for them” but that tracing “Connecticut River Valley craftsman to England’s North Country may someday provide a valuable clue.”

16. Francis J. Puig and Michael Conforti, eds., The American Craftsman and the European Tradition, 1620–1820 (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1989), p. xiii. The most blistering attack on antiquarianism and “sentimental patriotism” is Wendy Kaplan, “R. T. H. Halsey: An Ideology of Collecting American Decorative Arts,” Winterthur Portfolio 17, no. 1 (spring 1982): 43–53. This article, and its corresponding historiographical trend, made a cottage industry of trashing antiquarianism by caricaturing the efforts of pioneer museum men like R. T. H. Halsey, the creative spirit behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 1924 American wing. Halsey’s “hymn to individual achievement,” with its mission to (among other things) help immigrants “attempting to become good Americans,” is ridiculed by innuendo and association. The problem is not Kaplan’s analysis but its intentional implications. Associating Halsey—a visionary by any measure—with “intense Anglophilia” and identifying the campaign of “Americanization” (see William B. Rhoads, “The Colonial Revival and the Americanization of Immigrants,”in The Colonial Revival in America, edited by Alan Axelrod [New York: W.W. Norton, 1985], pp. 341–61) with nativism and the Ku Klux Klan is unjustified. Although paradoxically both inclusive and exclusive, the Americanization campaign looks, in hindsight, like a responsible and refreshingly gentle attempt at social engineering. Today, with confidence in the public sector at an all-time low and given the searingly divisive role of “multiculturalism,” victim group “rights,” and bilingualism (to name only three of the obvious targets), antiquarians like Halsey are no longer viable targets for ridicule. Indeed, the image of museums with so strong a sense of purpose and so engaged with issues in the world around them is inspiring.

17. Philip Zea and Suzanne L. Flynt, Hadley Chests (Deerfield, Mass.: Pocumtuk Valley Memorial Association, 1992); this exhibition was sponsored by Israel Sack, Inc., and opened in their New York gallery several months before joining the tour of Portsmouth Furniture in Hartford. Kirk, British Tradition, pp. 95–118. Both Kirk and Philip Zea have labored to prove that Hadley chests were the result of some still-undocumented migration of craftsmen from the Lancaster Lakes region of England. Although comparisons between the Hadley tradition and the work of British North Country artisans is noteworthy, Kevin Sweeney’s analysis of adaptation among converging styles by seventeenth-century Wethersfield, Connecticut, joiners is far more convincing (see his article in this volume). In any event, the Hadley chest is different enough from any of the joinery traditions with which it has been compared that the quality of invention is unmistakable. Just as there is no such thing as an entirely original design, there is also no such thing as one that is entirely derivative. Even the work of Thomas Dennis of Ipswich, Massachusetts, contemporaneous with the invention of the Hadley chest and widely touted for its similarity to the joinery tradition of the region (Exeter, West Country, England) where he was trained, exhibits some features of adaptation and change. “Innovation,” such as it is, is inevitably a matter of degree. The unidentified joiners who “invented” the Hadley chest exercised a significant degree of adaptation and inventiveness. Even after its invention, the style continued to change and “evolve” in practice.

18. Jules David Prown, “Style as Evidence,” Winterthur Portfolio 15, no. 3 (autumn 1980): 197–210. Garret, “Consumer’s Taste,” pp. 206–7.

19. Swank, et al., Pennsylvania Germans. William N. Hosley and Gerald W. R. Ward, eds., The Great River: Art and Society of the Connecticut Valley, 1635–1820 (Hartford, Conn.: Wadsworth Atheneum, 1985), pp. 226–27.

20. Montgomery, “Country Furniture,” pp. 355–59.

21. Houghton Bulkeley, “The ‘Aaron Roberts’ Attributions,” Contributions to Connecticut Cabinetmaking (Hartford, Conn.: Connecticut Historical Society, 1967), pp. 11–14; Robert F. Trent, “The Colchester School of Cabinetmaking, 1750–1800,” in Puig and Conforti, eds., The American Craftsman and the European Tradition, pp. 112–35. Margaretta M. Lovell, “Such Furniture as Will be Most Profitable: The Business of Cabinetmaking in Eighteenth-Century Newport,” Winterthur Portfolio 26, no. 1 (spring 1991): 27–62.

22. Philip Zea, “The Emergence of Neoclassical Furniture Making in Rural Western Massachusetts,” Antiques 142, no. 6 (December 1992): 842–51. Robert Blair St. George, “Artifacts of Regional Consciousness in the Connecticut River Valley, 1700–1780,” in Hosley and Ward, eds., The Great River, p. 34. St. George’s discussion of the “ideology of community” chronicles the various ways in which the Connecticut Valley’s elite “managed” the social dynamics of class in an agrarian society. Among other things, they “actively patronized local artisans and relied upon their skills rather than importing urban craftsman whose understanding of . . . theory may have been more ‘correct.’”

23. Timothy D. Rieman and Jean M. Burks, The Complete Book of Shaker Furniture (New York: Harry Abrams, 1993), pp. 66–77.

24. William N. Hosley Jr., “Architecture and Society of the Urban Frontier: Windsor, Vermont in 1800,” in The Bay and the River: 1600–1900. The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife: Annual Proceedings 1981, edited by Peter Benes (Boston: Boston University, 1982), pp. 73–86.

25. Bob Davis, “Growth of Trade Binds Nations, but It Also Can Spur Separatism,” Wall Street Journal (New York), June 20, 1994. Brock Jobe, ed., Portsmouth Furniture: Masterworks from the New Hampshire Seacoast (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England for the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, 1993), pp. 114–23, 176–81. Of all the furniture produced in Portsmouth, the most distinctive is work by Judkins & Senter (fl. 1808–1826) and their competitors, who were the last generation of Portsmouth furniture makers to enjoy a solid market for high-style cabinetwork. Portsmouth’s furniture industry was largely swept away by competition from Boston, New York, and elsewhere after 1830. Connel and Muller, “Ohio Furniture,” p. 466; a sideboard made by Jacob S. Ware (1802–1860) about 1830 in Frankfort, Ohio, is typical of the over-reach and flamboyance characteristic of furniture made by the last generation of regional cabinetmakers to enjoy local patronage for high-style furniture.

26. David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). With essays on “The Revolution as a Rising of Regional Cultures” (pp. 827–28), “The Friends’ Migration: Ethnic Origins” (pp. 429–39), and “Ethnic Origins: ‘We Are a Mixed People’” (pp. 618–21) about the Scotch and other “back country” settlers of West Virginia, this book is bursting with insight about the diverse subcultures that shaped political and social history in early America.

27. Susan Prendergast Schoelwer, “Connecticut Sunflower Furniture: A Familiar Form Reconsidered,” Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin (spring 1989): 20–37.

28. Elizabeth Bidwell Bates and Jonathan L. Fairbanks, American Furniture, 1620 to the Present (New York: Richard Marek, 1981). This is the only survey of American furniture that has attempted to be culturally inclusive by featuring not only the usual high-style urban work but also the regional vernacular, ethnic subcultures and “cheap” furniture intended for other purposes than parlor use and display.

29. The origins of the idea of “Yankee ingenuity” are not clear. It may have originated, and was certainly stimulated, by the success of New England manufactured products (notably the firearms manufactured by Robbins & Lawrence in Windsor, Vermont, and the revolvers manufactured by Samuel Colt in Hartford, Connecticut) at the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition (see Brooke Hindle and Steven Lubar, Engines of Change: The American Industrial Revolution, 1790–1860 [Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1986]; Nathan Rosenberg, “Why in America?” in Yankee Enterprise: The Rise of the American System of Manufacturers, edited by Otto Mayr and Robert C. Post [Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981], pp. 49–62). As early as 1851, a Hartford newspaper described New England’s “laying claim . . . to extraordinary ingenuity and inventive power,” as if it were then already a part of the mythology of the region (Hartford Daily Times, August 1, 1851). An 1855 article on “Connecticut Manufacturers” claimed that the nation’s “largest axe factory,” “largest clockmaking establishments,” “most numerous and extensive paper mills,” and “largest silk factory” were in Connecticut and noted how glass bottles, silverware, guns, clothespins, pianos, scythes, oars, coffee mills, steam engines, pewter ware, “and a hundred other things, are made in Connecticut, whose sons are famous for ingenuity and honest industry”(Hartford Times, July 12, 1855). Hank Morgan, Mark Twain’s fictional “Yankee inventor” in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), describes a personal history that could as easily have been that of the regional joiners and blacksmiths: “My father was a blacksmith, my uncle was a horse doctor, and I was both. . . . Then I went over to the great arms factory and learned my real trade; learned all there was to it; learned to make everything; guns, revolvers, cannon, boilers, engines, all sorts of labor-saving machinery. Why I could make anything a body wanted—anything in the world . . . and if there wasn’t any quick new-fangled way to make a thing, I could invent one—and do it as easy as rolling off a log.” Daniel V. DeSimone, “The Innovator,” The Engineer 8, nos. 1, 2 (1967), in Dartmouth Readings in the History and Philosophy of Technological Development: The Invention and Development Phases, edited by Joseph J. Ermenc (Hanover, N.H.: unpublished manuscript, Thayer School of Engineering, Dartmouth College, 1977), pp. 267–71. Tom D. Crouch, “Why Wilbur and Orville? Some Thoughts on the Wright Brothers and the Process of Invention,” in Inventive Minds: Creativity in Technology, edited by Robert J. Weber and David N. Perkins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 80–81. The Wright brothers were noted for their “relentless drive and will, their ability to look skeptics and rivals in the eye without blinking,” and for their “hard-edged and uncompromising personalities.”