Jennifer Van Horn
Biographic Data
| ID | 3950628 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jennifer Van Horn |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jennifer |
| FAMILY NAME | Van Horn |
| SIGNATURE | VAN HORN J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Delaware |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 12 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 5 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 12 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Plantation Goods
Seth Rockman's highly anticipated Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery brings into direct and inescapable proximity New Englanders’ burgeoning wealth from an industrious and industrial revolution, white southerners’ profits through slavery, and enslaved African Americans’ lived experiences to reconstruct the economic, political, ethical, and material entanglements that bound north and south between roughly 1800 to 1860. At the…
The Politics of Rustication
This article explores George Washington’s Virginia plantation, Mount Vernon, as a workshop. Contrary to the common perception that plantations functioned solely as agricultural centers, they were also hubs of skilled craft carried out primarily by enslaved people of African origin and descent. The article delves into the politics of material reuse by investigating the repurposing of Aquia sandstone. Quarried by enslaved individuals, the stone was…
Building Antebellum New Orleans
Journal Article Building Antebellum New Orleans: Free People of Color and Their Influence Get access Building Antebellum New Orleans: Free People of Color and Their Influence. By Tara A Dudley. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2021. xvi, 302 pp. $50.00.) Jennifer Van Horn Jennifer Van Horn University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 109, I…
Remapping Resistance
This is a three-part perspective on a single work of art: Edward Savage’s The Washington Family (1789–96). Mia L. Bagneris’s essay places this painting alongside other images of George Washington with African diasporic subjects from the eighteenth century to the present to illuminate how the iconic image of the founding father—upheld as a symbol of the values of the nation itself—was and is inextricably bound up in White supremacy and anti-Blackn…
Dancing in the Flames
This essay investigates a pair of early American andirons that depict identical African figures, each holding a decanter and wine glass. Manufactured by enslaved laborers at an unidentified iron foundry, the andirons depict Black bodies laboring in service. The andirons resemble contemporary representations of enslaved attendants serving White subjects in portraits, as well as woodblock-printed figures that decorated newspaper advertisements for …
The Obama Portraits
Taina Caragol, Dorothy Moss, Richard J. Powell, and Kim Sajet. The Obama Portraits . Washington, DC: National Portrait Gallery – Smithsonian Institution; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press
Joanna Cohen. Luxurious Citizens
In the weeks after 9/11, President George W. Bush famously urged Americans to consume as a means to oppose terrorism and to strengthen the country. The terrorist attacks illuminated a deeply held but seemingly arbitrary belief in the connection between patriotism, citizenship, and consumption. When did Americans decide that they could create a stronger nation through their purchases, and how did the ability to consume freely become a fundamental …
Face Value
It is rare that one is asked to review a text that has already been hailed as a seminal work. But such is the case with Carson’s Face Value. The book’s genesis was an essay, “The Consumer Revolution in Colonial British America: Why Demand?,” initially published in the 1994 volume Of Consuming Interests.1 Carson’s meaty chapter quickly became a “cult classic” (xv), as the author rightfully describes. The 1994 collected volume—with contributions by…
Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America
Over the course of the eighteenth century, Anglo-Americans purchased an unprecedented number and array of goods. This book investigates these diverse artifacts—from portraits and city views to gravestones, dressing furniture, and prosthetic devices—to explore how elite American consumers assembled objects to form a new civil society on the margins of the British Empire. In this interdisciplinary transatlantic study, artifacts emerge as key player…
Republic of Taste
When scholars consider the founding of the American Republic they usually imagine a political story. In The Republic of Taste Catherine E. Kelly offers instead an aesthetic tale. To be sure, politics and taste go hand in hand. As Kelly argues, “American thinkers explored questions about taste and beauty in order to wrestle with questions about power and authority” (p. 4). Across chapter-length case studies, Kelly demonstrates that the exercise of…
The Mask of Civility
Samplers, Gentility, and the Middling Sort
Samplers are an important, yet often overlooked, component of class and identity formation in early America. This article reevaluates the genteel practices of the middling sort through analysis of ten samplers produced between 1798 and 1802 at Leah Galligher's school in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Rather than emulating the upper sorts, these samplermakers incorporated gentility within their rank's pattern of life to produce a sense of middle‐class c…
Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America
Over the course of the eighteenth century, Anglo-Americans purchased an unprecedented number and array of goods. This book investigates these diverse artifacts—from portraits and city views to gravestones, dressing furniture, and prosthetic devices—to explore how elite American consumers assembled objects to form a new civil society on the margins of the British Empire. In this interdisciplinary transatlantic study, artifacts emerge as key player…
Samplers, Gentility, and the Middling Sort
Samplers are an important, yet often overlooked, component of class and identity formation in early America. This article reevaluates the genteel practices of the middling sort through analysis of ten samplers produced between 1798 and 1802 at Leah Galligher's school in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Rather than emulating the upper sorts, these samplermakers incorporated gentility within their rank's pattern of life to produce a sense of middle‐class c…
The Mask of Civility
Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America
Over the course of the eighteenth century, Anglo-Americans purchased an unprecedented number and array of goods. This book investigates these diverse artifacts—from portraits and city views to gravestones, dressing furniture, and prosthetic devices—to explore how elite American consumers assembled objects to form a new civil society on the margins of the British Empire. In this interdisciplinary transatlantic study, artifacts emerge as key player…
Republic of Taste
When scholars consider the founding of the American Republic they usually imagine a political story. In The Republic of Taste Catherine E. Kelly offers instead an aesthetic tale. To be sure, politics and taste go hand in hand. As Kelly argues, “American thinkers explored questions about taste and beauty in order to wrestle with questions about power and authority” (p. 4). Across chapter-length case studies, Kelly demonstrates that the exercise of…
Joanna Cohen. Luxurious Citizens
In the weeks after 9/11, President George W. Bush famously urged Americans to consume as a means to oppose terrorism and to strengthen the country. The terrorist attacks illuminated a deeply held but seemingly arbitrary belief in the connection between patriotism, citizenship, and consumption. When did Americans decide that they could create a stronger nation through their purchases, and how did the ability to consume freely become a fundamental …
Face Value
It is rare that one is asked to review a text that has already been hailed as a seminal work. But such is the case with Carson’s Face Value. The book’s genesis was an essay, “The Consumer Revolution in Colonial British America: Why Demand?,” initially published in the 1994 volume Of Consuming Interests.1 Carson’s meaty chapter quickly became a “cult classic” (xv), as the author rightfully describes. The 1994 collected volume—with contributions by…
The Obama Portraits
Taina Caragol, Dorothy Moss, Richard J. Powell, and Kim Sajet. The Obama Portraits . Washington, DC: National Portrait Gallery – Smithsonian Institution; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press
Remapping Resistance
This is a three-part perspective on a single work of art: Edward Savage’s The Washington Family (1789–96). Mia L. Bagneris’s essay places this painting alongside other images of George Washington with African diasporic subjects from the eighteenth century to the present to illuminate how the iconic image of the founding father—upheld as a symbol of the values of the nation itself—was and is inextricably bound up in White supremacy and anti-Blackn…
Dancing in the Flames
This essay investigates a pair of early American andirons that depict identical African figures, each holding a decanter and wine glass. Manufactured by enslaved laborers at an unidentified iron foundry, the andirons depict Black bodies laboring in service. The andirons resemble contemporary representations of enslaved attendants serving White subjects in portraits, as well as woodblock-printed figures that decorated newspaper advertisements for …
Building Antebellum New Orleans
Journal Article Building Antebellum New Orleans: Free People of Color and Their Influence Get access Building Antebellum New Orleans: Free People of Color and Their Influence. By Tara A Dudley. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2021. xvi, 302 pp. $50.00.) Jennifer Van Horn Jennifer Van Horn University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 109, I…
The Politics of Rustication
This article explores George Washington’s Virginia plantation, Mount Vernon, as a workshop. Contrary to the common perception that plantations functioned solely as agricultural centers, they were also hubs of skilled craft carried out primarily by enslaved people of African origin and descent. The article delves into the politics of material reuse by investigating the repurposing of Aquia sandstone. Quarried by enslaved individuals, the stone was…
Plantation Goods
Seth Rockman's highly anticipated Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery brings into direct and inescapable proximity New Englanders’ burgeoning wealth from an industrious and industrial revolution, white southerners’ profits through slavery, and enslaved African Americans’ lived experiences to reconstruct the economic, political, ethical, and material entanglements that bound north and south between roughly 1800 to 1860. At the…
Art (8 works) · History (8 works) · Law (7 works) · Political science (7 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Aesthetics (6 works) · Art history (5 works) · Portrait (5 works) · Politics (4 works) · Citizenship (3 works)