Results by title

53 books match the query 'Dwellings' and 3 start with b

cover of Belvoir: An Archaeology of Maryland Slavery

Belvoir

An Archaeology of Maryland Slavery

Julie M. Schablitsky

University of Alabama Press, 2025

Unearthed truths, buried lives: Belvoir reveals the pain, resilience, and reckoning found beneath the soil of a Maryland plantation.

Near Annapolis, Maryland, a former tobacco plantation dating to the 1730s holds centuries of untold history. In Belvoir: An Archaeology of Maryland Slavery, Julie M. Schablitsky leads readers on an archaeological narrative to unearth the lives and stories still buried there.The book begins with an introduction to the estate’s history, detailing its ownership by prominent families such as the Rosses, Scotts, Worthingtons, and Welshes. Schablitsky highlights the landscape of the estate, including the unique thirty-two-square-foot stone quarter built for enslaved people.

With sensitivity and scientific rigor, Schablitsky shifts focus to the enslaved people who lived and labored at Belvoir for more than eighty years. Through detailed excavation of the stone quarter and analysis of everyday artifacts—buttons, tobacco pipes, food remains, ceramics—she reconstructs the daily life, acts of resistance, and the cultural endurance of a community forced to navigate brutality.

Yet what makes Belvoir especially vital is its ethical compass. Schablitsky centers the voices of descendants, allowing their questions, memories, and presence to shape the narrative. The result is a groundbreaking archaeological case study and a blueprint for restorative justice at sites of enslavement. Scholars, archaeologists, and general readers alike will find Belvoir a deeply human, profoundly necessary book, one that confronts the past with clarity, care, and the hope of reconciliation.

[more]
cover of Building a Market: The Rise of the Home Improvement Industry, 1914-1960

Building a Market

The Rise of the Home Improvement Industry, 1914-1960

Richard Harris

University of Chicago Press, 2012

Each year, North Americans spend as much money fixing up their homes as they do buying new ones. This obsession with improving our dwellings has given rise to a multibillion-dollar industry that includes countless books, consumer magazines, a cable television network, and thousands of home improvement stores.
Building a Market charts the rise of the home improvement industry in the United States and Canada from the end of World War I into the late 1950s. Drawing on the insights of business, social, and urban historians, and making use of a wide range of documentary sources, Richard Harris shows how the middle-class preference for home ownership first emerged in the 1920s—and how manufacturers, retailers, and the federal government combined to establish the massive home improvement market and a pervasive culture of Do-It-Yourself. 
Deeply insightful, Building a Market is the carefully crafted history of the emergence and evolution of a home improvement revolution that changed not just American culture but the American landscape as well.
[more]
cover of Building a Social Contract: Modern Workers' Houses in Early-Twentieth Century Detroit

Building a Social Contract

Modern Workers' Houses in Early-Twentieth Century Detroit

McCulloch, Michael

Temple University Press, 2023

The dream of the modern worker’s house emerged in early twentieth-century America as wage earners gained access to new, larger, and better-equipped dwellings. Building a Social Contract is a cogent history of the houses those workers dreamed of and labored for. Michael McCulloch chronicles the efforts of employers, government agencies, and the building industry who, along with workers themselves, produced an unprecedented boom in housing construction that peaked in the mid-1920s.

Through oral histories, letters, photographs, and period fiction, McCulloch traces wage earners’ agency in negotiating a new implicit social contract, one that rewarded hard work with upward mobility in modern houses. This promise reflected workers’ increased bargaining power but, at the same time, left them increasingly vulnerable to layoffs.

Building a Social Contract focuses on Detroit, the quintessential city of the era, where migrant workers came and were Americanized, and real estate agents and the speculative housebuilding industry thrived. The Motor City epitomized the struggle of Black workers in this period, who sought better lives through industrial labor but struggled to translate their wages into housing security amid racist segregation and violence. When Depression-era unemployment created an eviction crisis, the social contract unraveled, and workers rose up—at the polls and in the streets—to create a labor movement that reshaped American capitalism for decades.

Today, the lessons McCulloch provides from early twentieth-century Detroit are a necessary reminder that wages are not enough, and only working-class political power can secure affordable housing.
[more]