One of my very favourite books of last year, a wonderful all encompassing history of European and American home life as experienced over the past 500 years. Judith Flanders overturns our notions of what home has meant in previous centuries, our own notions of the family home would seem fantastical even to someone from 100 years ago. How advancements have been made are lovingly detailed and the humblest household item is considered alongside more necessary items such as bricks for the walls and glass for the windows. I loved the wealth of detail, the quotations from diaries, letters and literature and how one is left wondering what the future will bring, will future homes be unrecognisable to us? ~ Sue Baker
Like for Like Reading
If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home, Lucy Worsley
House Proud: 19th Century Watercolour Interiors, Gail S Davidson, Floramae McCarron-Cates & Charlotte Gere
| Primary Genre | History |
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The idea that 'home' is a special place, a separate place, a place where we can be our true selves, is so obvious to us today that we barely pause to think about it. But, as Judith Flanders shows in this revealing book, 'home' is a relatively new concept. When in 1900 Dorothy assured the citizens of Oz that 'There is no place like home', she was expressing a view that was a culmination of 300 years of economic, physical and emotional change. In The Making of Home, Flanders traces the evolution of the house across northern Europe and America from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century, and paints a striking picture of how the homes we know today differ from homes through history. The transformation of houses into homes, she argues, was not a private matter, but an essential ingredient in the rise of capitalism and the birth of the Industrial Revolution. Without 'home', the modern world as we know it would not exist, and as Flanders charts the development of ordinary household objects - from cutlery, chairs and curtains, to fitted kitchens, plumbing and windows - she also peels back the myths that surround some of our most basic assumptions, including our entire notion of what it is that makes a family. As full of fascinating detail as her previous bestsellers, The Making of Home is also a book teeming with original and provocative ideas.
The Making of Home The 500-Year Story of How Our Houses Became Homes features in the following genres: History, Biographies & Autobiographies, Non-Fiction Books of the Month, eBooks of the Month, History and Archaeology, Biography, Literature and Literary studies, Recommendations
The Making of Home The 500-Year Story of How Our Houses Became Homes is available in Paperback
The Making of Home The 500-Year Story of How Our Houses Became Homes was written by Judith Flanders and published by Atlantic Books
The Making of Home The 500-Year Story of How Our Houses Became Homes has 368 pages
£13.49
