Where We Lived : Discovering the Places We Once Called Home

Where We Lived : Discovering the Places We Once Called Home. Author, Jack Larkin

In Where We Lived, these houses are our guides as we journey through the vanished landscape of our country when it was very young. Mile markers on this journey are the remarkable photographs of the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), created to document the nation's early structures.

On this journey, you'll come to understand what houses meant to individuals and families in early America, from great mansions to tiny cabins: How did they work as "machines for living"? What did they signal for their owners: wealth? respectability? independence? survival? poverty?

The narrative of our journey draws heavily on travelers' accounts, public records, community and family histories, letters and diaries, even novels and stories. It also takes note of the Direct Tax of 1798, which counted and measured houses from Maine to Georgia.

Still, Where We Lived isn't a chronology of architectural development but an exploration. Page after page, you'll move across time and places to weave together stories of regions, ways of life, houses, and families. Beginning with a look at the common features of home life - you'll understand size and scale, space, crowding, privacy, cleanliness, and everyday life of the inhabitants of these houses.

From New England to the Middle States, from the South to the territory between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River called the West, you're treated to the earliest surviving homes of the New World to the "new" houses of the Greek Revival.

ISBN 978-1-56158-847-3

Hardcover, 256 pages.