Product Description

When they declared independence in Philadelphia in 1776, they changed the course of Western history. But the patriots—landowners, merchants, and professional men who hailed from towns, cities, and plantations scattered along the eastern seaboard—had private lives too, quite apart from the public deeds we know so well. In this breathtaking volume, historian Hugh Howard and photographer Roger Straus examine the everyday lives of the Founding Fathers.

Houses of the Founding Fathers takes us on an eye-opening tour of forty stately eighteenth-century houses. We see the mansions of such legendary figures as Jefferson, Washington, Adams, and Hamilton, along with the homes of many other signers of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. At sites from Maine to Georgia, with stops in each of the thirteen colonies, the grand story of the Revolution emerges from unique and individual domestic perspectives.

Houses overlooking the sea, in busy townscapes, or atop mountains reveal these patriots’ tastes in architecture, furniture, and horticulture. There are tales of friends and enemies, murderous relatives, reluctant revolutionaries, adoring wives, and runaway servants. The founding families are brought to life in the rituals of birth and death, the food they ate, the archaic medical practices they endured, their household arrangements, and the way their slaves lived.

Houses of the Founding Fathers offers a penetrating look at the private lives of the men whose ideas ignited an insurrection against England—and who helped create the modern world.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #16112 in Books
• Published on: 2007-11-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 354 pages

Review
"The 40 houses and 48 people profiled in this lushly illustrated coffee-table book provide a sense of place for the American Revolution. Hugh Howard's text peoples the bare rooms in the reader's mind, and Straus' photographs give the armchair traveler a good sense of what tourists experience, if not a complete historical accounting."
—San Francisco Chronicle (The San Francisco Chronicle )

The 40 houses and 48 people profiled in this lushly illustrated coffee-table book provide a sense of place for the American Revolution. Hugh Howard's text peoples the bare rooms in the reader's mind, and Straus' photographs give the armchair traveler a good sense of what tourists experience, if not a complete historical accounting. San Francisco Chronicle (The San Francisco Chronicle )

Review
"What a smart, elegantly conceived book this is! Hugh Howard and photographer Roger Strauss III walk us through the homes of our Founding Fathers, transporting us back in time. A real treasure!"
–Douglas Brinkley, author of The Great Deluge and The Boys of Pointe du Hoc

About the Author
Hugh Howard has spent much of the last twenty years pursuing his passion for historic architecture. He is the author of nine books in the field, including the recent Dr. Kimball and Mr. Jefferson: Rediscovering the Founding Fathers of American Architecture. He has also worked as a writer and researcher for the A&E series In Search of Palladio. He lives in East Chatham, New York, with his wife and two daughters.

Roger Straus III spent thirty years working in book publishing before leaving to devote himself full-time to photography. His work has been featured in six books, including US I: America’s Original Main Street, Mississippi Currents, Modernism Reborn, and Wright for Wright. Straus’s photographs have also appeared in newspapers and magazines such as The Washington Post and Architectural Digest. He lives in City Island, New York.

Customer Reviews

Forty of America's Historic Homes
One of my favorite pleasures is visiting historic homes. Nothing gives you a sense of history and biography like entering the dining room or bedroom of the house of an historical figure and examining family portraits, admiring classical moldings, and peering through wavy eighteenth-century window panes at a garden topiary below. Aside from visitng old homes, the next best thing is paging through collections of them such as those found in this handsome volume by Hugh Howard and photographer Roger Straus III.

The authors have visited the homes of forty of the luminaries of eighteenth-century America and given us not only magnificent color photos of the interiors and exteriors of these houses, but Howard has written elegant summaries of the owners' lives, their political importance, and their domestic architectural tastes.

What is unusual about Howard and Straus' effort is the range of selection. There are the expected chapters on Mount Vernon, Monticello, and the homes of the Lees and Randolphs of Virginia, but the book also includes the residences of more obscure members of the nation's founders such as Benjamin Chew of Pennsylvania, William Paca of Maryland, and William Whipple of New Hampshire, a signer of the Declaration of Independence.

This is not only a book for the coffee table, but one to be read with appetite and consulted on your next trip to America's historic homes.

Stunning
Much more than a coffee table book, it has superb pix, great stories with each house, and architectural detail as well. Many great interiro shots of rooms, etc. For the heft, quality, pix and presentation, the price is WELL worth it. Highly recommended.

Why I'm homesick for the East
This book is many things. First, it's a selective architectural survey of many of the homes of our most important founders. While not exhaustive, the selection of sites is representative of important examples in the late Georgian, Adam, and Federal styles throughout the East. Well placed side-bars bring the readers attention to other sites and personalities, such as a neighboring plantation, church, or an important visitor, that frame each of the feature sites in historical context. It's a very nice touch that adds depth and beauty to the book.

All the houses are beautifully captured by Straus' stunning photography. Something potential buyers should know is that much of the photography is of the interiors, and there are few close shots of architectural details. This book is really intended for a general readership rather than for architectural historians.

Howard's text is really quite good, also intended for the curious reader rather than the serious history scholar. This is a book to be enjoyed rather than studied. It's for casual browsing, but offers enough architectural and historical insight to be interesting to the well informed reader. There's much more quality here than what we normally expect in a "coffee-table book."

Now, if I could just get Amazon to deliver this book to me undamaged...