Americana Insights 2023 presents the latest research and discoveries on traditional American folk art and material culture. Groundbreaking essays by leading scholars provide a wealth of new insights on a wide array of artistic traditions. Covering a broad geographic area—including New England, the mid-Atlantic, South, and mid-West—and spanning the colonial era to early twentieth century, these essays enhance our understanding of the diverse American experience. This is the only interdisciplinary publication devoted exclusively to traditional Americana and folk art.

Contributors cover a range of topics including portraiture, furniture, jewelry, textiles, and works on paper. In the first volume, authors share groundbreaking research on the use of hooked rugs in the colonial revival era; revisit the work of a famed Connecticut portrait painter known as the Beardsley Limner and his namesake sitters; Rufus Porter’s work as an artist and entrepreneur; a distinctive group of paint-decorated dressing tables from New Hampshire; delicate cutworks made by an incarcerated inmate in Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary; painted tavern signs; jewelry in folk portraiture; New Jersey schoolmaster and calligrapher Thomas Earl; and signature quilts from the nineteenth century.

Contributors: Deborah M. Child, Pamela and Brian Ehrlich, Cynthia Fowler, Emelie Gevalt, Mark D. Mitchell, Eileen M. Smiles, Laura Fecych Sprague.

A richly illustrated presentation of the latest research on traditional American folk art

Americana Insights 2024 is the second volume of an annual series that presents the latest research and discoveries on traditional American folk art and material culture. This installment explores a diverse range of craftspeople and artifacts, treating readers to a journey from Appalachia to the mid-Atlantic and New England, and even onto the Atlantic Ocean. Each essay offers a fresh perspective on American creativity and ingenuity, introducing readers to the makers and materials of early America. This remains the only interdisciplinary publication devoted exclusively to traditional Americana and folk art.

Contributors cover a range of topics including historic Cherokee river cane basket weaving traditions, New England folk artists Sturtevant J. Hamblin, the almshouse paintings of German immigrant Charles Hofmann, and the display of American antiques on mid-twentieth-century ocean liners. Additional subjects include Pennsylvania German fraktur, carousel carving, carriage signs, quilts, and game boards.

Contributors: Trevor Brandt, Paul D’Ambrosio, Tobin Fraley, Emelie Gevalt, Christopher Malone, Richard Miller, Matthew Monk, Amelia Peck, Christian Roden, Cynthia Schaffner, Eileen M. Smiles, Jennifer Swope.

A comprehensive study of Pennsylvania German redware and a celebration of this vibrant folk art tradition

Americana Insights 2025 is the third volume in an annual series that presents the latest research and discoveries on traditional Americana, folk art, and material culture. In this volume the authors explore a beloved aspect of American folk art—Pennsylvania German redware. Focusing on redware’s production, use, and collecting in southeastern Pennsylvania from the mid-eighteenth to early twentieth century, the authors provide fresh insights into renowned potters such as Georg Hubener and Samuel Troxel as well as lesser-known figures. Other essays delve into the work of twentieth-century potters like Jacob Medinger, considered the last of the traditional Pennsylvania German potters, and Mildred Keyser, a pioneering revivalist potter. The authors also explore broader themes, including the use of political imagery and hunting iconography, and redware’s role in cultural exchange between Anglo-Americans and Pennsylvania Germans. A celebration of this vibrant folk art tradition and a vital scholarly contribution, Americana Insights 2025 represents the most comprehensive study of Pennsylvania German redware in more than a century.

Contributors: Johanna Brown, Laini Farrare, R. Erich Hess, Christopher Malone, Lisa Minardi, Karl Pass, Candace Perry, Jeffrey Pressman, Jean Renshaw, Justin Thomas, Adam Zayas.

The sumptuousness and grandeur of Nubian gold jewelry analyzed and illustrated for the first time

The fabled land of Nubia, whose very name means ‘gold,’ was famous in ancient times for its supplies of precious metal, exotic material, and intricate craftsmanship. Many of the adornments made in Nubia are masterpieces of the jeweler’s art—marvels of design and construction rivaling, and often surpassing, adornments made in Egypt and the rest of the ancient Mediterranean world. Although these unique treasures are among the most stunning to have survived from antiquity, they remain little known.

Richly illustrated with beautiful photographs of these exquisite items, many of them never before published, Nubian Gold also places the jewelry within the cultural contexts in which it was manufactured and employed. It tells the story not only of the treasures themselves but of the exciting tales of their discovery and the rich background of the exotic and remote civilizations that produced them.

The book also explores the innovative techniques used to procure the precious materials used in the jewelry and to craft them into intricate ornaments replete with magical purpose and coded meaning. Featured in the book are not only the intricately crafted pieces themselves but depictions of them in sculpture, relief, and painting as well as references to them in ancient texts, locating them within the full spectrum of Nubian history, from the earliest beginnings of society to the advent of Christianity.

The first illustrated study of ethnic silver jewelry in Yemen, by an expert researcher and collector, new in paperback

Silver Treasures from the Land of Sheba documents a disappearing artistic and cultural tradition with over three hundred photographs showing individual pieces, rare images of women wearing their jewelry with traditional dress, and the various regions in Yemen where the author did her field research. Ransom’s descriptions of the people she met and befriended, and her exploration of the significance of a woman’s handmade jewelry with its attributes of power, protection, beauty, and personal identity, will appeal to ethnic jewelry fans, ethnographers, jewelry designers, and art historians.

Amulet cases, hair ornaments, bridal headdresses, earrings, necklaces, ankle and wrist bracelets are all beautifully photographed in intricate detail, interspersed with the author’s own photographs of the women who shared their stories and their hospitality with her. A chapter on the history of silversmithing in Yemen tells the surprising story of the famed Jewish Yemeni silversmiths, many of whom left Yemen in the late 1940s. This is the first in-depth study of Yemeni silver, uniquely illustrated with photographs of a world that is transforming before our eyes, and animated with the portraits of a precious legacy.