|
 Welcome.
 |
Be the first to hear about our weekly specials, publication highlights and new government reports on our blog |
|
Receive the latest updates by following us on Twitter |

 |
William Lewis, Esquire: Enlightened Statesman, Profound Lawyer, and Useful Citizen
|
|
Elin’s Amerika (rev., 3rd ed.)
|
|
|
|
|
Lewis (1752-1819) was a prominent Philadelphia lawyer, Federalist and abolitionist. His descendant Esther Ann McFarland spent years locating records by and about Lewis and compiling this study. “History buffs will be fascinated by this authentic account of the role a leading Phila. lawyer played in shaping the character of our nation while we transitioned from colonial to post-revolutionary times. As an advisor to our Founding Fathers, a champion of individual rights, a strong advocate for abolition of slavery, a state legislator, an inaugural officer of the Phila. Bar Assoc. and Pennsylvania’s first U.S. Attorney and second fed. judge, William Lewis had a major impact on the development of our laws and the balance achieved by our fed. and state governments.” Illus.
|
Award-winning children’s author Marguerite de Angeli tells the story of Elin, a young girl who has come to live in the New Sweden Colony. She helps us envision how these many different peoples -- Swedes, Finns, Lenape, Minquas (Susquehannock), Dutch and British related to one another. Elin’s search for friendship, love of family, and anticipation of celebrations seem familiar. Her isolation from other children, lack of basic things, and the daily routine of chores may seem quite unfamiliar. New Sweden was established in 1638, under the guidance of Peter Minuit, when Swedish colonists were sent to the New World to claim lands in the area around the Delaware River in southeastern PA and south NJ. For ages 8-12. Illustrations.
|
|
What Ever Happened to the U.S. Congress's Portraits of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette? Retracing the Events that Led to the Conflagration of the Capitol and the Loss of the Pictures on 24-25 August 1814: Tran. of the American Philosophical Society V
|
|
Speaking in Tongues: APS, Transactions (Vol. 106, Part 4) 2016
|
|
|
|
|
One of the greatest unsolved mysteries in American political culture is what became of the United States Congress’s state portraits of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette during the British invasion of the Capitol, Washington, D.C., on the night of 24–25 August 1814. Conceived by Benjamin Franklin during a diplomatic mission, requested by the American delegates at the height of the War of Independence, and granted by the French king after the signing of the Treaty of Paris, these official full-length images of the French monarchs arrayed in ceremonial magnificence were recently identified as atelier copies after Antoine-François Callet’s Louis XVI and Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun’s Marie-Antoinette (both 1783) and traced through Congress’s successive assembly rooms at New York City (1785), Philadelphia (1790), and Washington (1800). The fate of the royal portraits has been difficult to determine due to the incomplete documentary record and conflicting eyewitness accounts. Larkin initially takes a telescopic approach to the problem, moving from British and French production of state portraits to assert political claims in North America and despoliation of Western European countries of their art treasures, to show British and American interests at stake in the practice of looting and incendiary warfare waged across the Great Lakes and the Chesapeake Bay prior to the destruction of the public buildings in Washington, D.C. He then pursues a microscopic approach, analyzing period documents, letters, images, and plans to test the viability of two theories—that the royal portraits were burned by British troops during their occupation of the capital or looted by American scavengers during the chaotic aftermath. While physical evidence of the portrait artifacts remains elusive, this study of the images as objects of desire, danger, and loss breaks new ground for scholars desirous of constituting an art and material history for the War of 1812. <br><br> T. Lawrence Larkin is Professor of Seventeenth- to Nineteenth-Century European Art at Montana State University, Bozeman. He has published on aspects of early modern French and American art and culture, with a two-fold interest in the portrait patronage and mythical permutations of Queen Marie-Antoinette and the trans-Atlantic diplomatic gifts and political culture of French, British, and American governments during the Revolutionary and Imperial Eras. His books include a monograph, In Search of Marie-Antoinette: Stefan Zweig, Irving Thalberg, and Norma Shearer (Palgrave-Macmillan), and an edited volume, Politics & Portraits in the United States & France during the Age of Revolution (Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press), both published in 2019.
|
Raised in a Lebanese mountain village, Fedwa Malti-Douglas came to America at the age of 13. After a rich academic career, Professor Malti-Douglas turned her attention to other muses, publishing a novel (Hisland, SUNY Press) in 1998, and poetry (including a chapbook of visual poetry). Fedwa’s honors include the 1997 Kuwait Prize in Arts and letters, and the National Humanities Medal for 2014, presented in 2015 by President Barack Obama. This volume tells the story of a family torn apart by divorce, death, and exile, and reunited by an inherited form of muscular dystrophy. It has been praised as “a memoir of unpitying clarity,” “deeply moving and arresting,” which “crosses landscapes of sadness, of happiness, of pain and peace, of alienation and acceptance, toward a healing enlargement of the soul.” Color photos.
|
|
Wright's Ferry Mansion, 2 Volume Set: Volume 1: The House; Volume 2: The Collection
|
|
The Chicago Lawyer Arthur Jerome Eddy and His Eclectic Art Collection: Transactions, APS (Vol. 111, Part 2)
|
|
|
|
|
A jewel of early 18th-century house museums, Wright’s Ferry Mansion is also Pennsylvania’s best-kept secret, tucked away along the banks of the Susquehanna River in Columbia, PA. Built in 1738 for the dynamic English Quaker Susanna Wright, the house has been restored and furnished by The von Hess Foundation. These beautiful volumes tell the fascinating history of the house and its original owner Susanna Wright, who was a friend of Benjamin Franklin and other luminaries of early Pennsylvania. It is the only Pennsylvania English Quaker house furnished exclusively to the first half of the 18th century. The collection includes important Philadelphia William and Mary and Queen Anne furniture and English ceramics, metals, glass, and needlework, all pre-dating 1750. The appendix contains the original text of numerous letters, wills, inventories, poems, and two treatises by Susanna Wright and her brother James. Author and art historian Elizabeth Meg Schaefer has been curator of the mansion since 1982. 2-volume hardcover set in slipcase. Vol. 1 describes the house and furnishings; Vol. 1 describes each item in detail. Color photos.
|
Arthur Jerome Eddy, the Chicago lawyer, author, and art collector, was a legend in his lifetime (1859-1920). He was the first person to buy radically modern paintings by Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia at the 1913 Army Show, the first American collector to purchase works by Vasily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, and arguably the first person to write a book about modern art in the U.S. A prominent corporation lawyer, one century later, Eddy is best known as a collector of modern art. This book explores how he began to collect, when and from whom he bought art, which artists he favored, and why he acquired certain works and not others. Illus.
|
|
|
 |

Today's Super Deal! |
|

Other Presidency: Thomas Jefferson
|
Our Price: $15.00 Sale Price: $10.00 You save $5.00!
|
|
|
The Other Presidency: Thomas Jefferson and the American Philosophical Society, by Patrick Spero, With research assistance by Abigail Shelton and John Kenney.
|
|
|
|
 |



|