The power of Christmas derives from the appeal of its repeated rituals, the presumed antiquity of its traditions, and its ability to adapt to changing cultural conditions. Christmas cards seemed inevitable and ubiquitous, but in recent years the genre has been visibly in decline. It is now evident that the Christmas card was a culturally specific artifact, a distinctive way in which a fundamental human gesture could be expressed within a commercial, materialistic, and rapidly changing society. 
This stylish book explores the imagery, graphic forms, subject matter, and significance of Christmas cards in their chronological timeframe to reveal an important area of American material culture. There is much to surprise and delight.

American Christmas Cards 1900-1960

Arts & Photography

Ames, Kenneth L.

History & Criticism

Bard Graduate Center

Beyond Necessity : Art in the Folk Tradition

The Winterthur Museum/W. W. Norton & Company

In this provocative look at Victorian America, Kenneth Ames explores the minds of Victorians by examining some of their most distinctive and fascinating creations. Featuring five once-prominent home furnishings, he reconstructs a vanished culture and demonstrates the centrality of the artifact to historical understanding. Richly illustrated with photographs of surviving objects as well as images from a wide variety of period sources, the five essays discuss specific pieces—hallstands, sideboards, embroidered mottoes, parlor organs, and seating furniture—within the context of broader cultural issues and concerns. Ames reveals not only the major outlines of Victorian culture but also the conflicts and tensions deep within that culture. 
An extraordinary proliferation of goods characterizes the Victorian world. Throughout the study, Ames considers the relationship of some of these household objects to issues of class, gender, and place. For example, the importance of public image was dramatized by the rituals of the front hall in Victorian homes: its placement within the house, the massive hallstand with its receptacles for calling cards and umbrellas, accommodations for temporary and usually uncomfortable seating. The dining room was a shrine to the notion of "man's" dominion over nature—each elaborately carved sideboard displayed a frieze of slaughtered game and harvested vegetation. Parlor organs, a blending of the sacred and the profane, provided an occasion to display feminine accomplishment and to symbolize the role of the bourgeois Christian lady. Ames also discusses how the prevailing class and gender hierarchy was echoed in the posture of seating furniture and its arrangement. 
The author is one of the premier interpreters of Victorian culture in America. His witty, provocative, and irreverent commentary on the "quaint" fixtures of the Victorian household will fascinate scholars, antique buffs, and collectors on nostalgia.

Death in the Dining Room and Other Tales of Victorian Culture

History

Americas

Temple Univ Pr

Catalog to the exhibition of 1977 from the museum's collection, featuring folk art items with descriptions, and color or black-and-white photos. Items included toys, clocks, lighting, storage units, metalwares, needlework, looms, sculpture, and other items.

Beyond necessity: Art in the folk tradition : an exhibition from the collections of Winterthur Museum at the Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, 17 September-16 November, 1977

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Antiques & Collectibles

Distributed by W.W. Norton

A useful bibliography on 21 specific aspects of decorative arts and household furnishings.

Decorative Arts and Household Furnishings in America, 1650-1920: An Annotated Bibliography

Ward, Gerald W.R.

Winterthur Museum

This is the first comprehensive survey of the New York Historical Society's superb collection of early American silver. It features the full range of silver works, from masterpieces like the 1772 salver by New York City silversmith Lewis Fueter, to the teapot made by Albany silversmith Kiliaen Van Rensselaer in 1695—one of the earliest teapots made in New York.

Stories in Sterling: Four Centuries of Silver in New York

Hofer, Margaret K.

Bach, Debra Schmidt

Barquist, David L.

GILES

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Books by Ames, Kenneth L.