George Boudreau and Margaretta Lovell trace the origins of A Material World: Culture, Society, and the Life of Things in Early Anglo-America to the scholarly community and discourse that has developed at the University of Pennsylvania's McNeil Center for Early American Studies. The center was founded in 1978 as the Philadelphia Center for Early American Studies and renamed the McNeil Center in 1998 in honor of Robert L. McNeil, Jr. The volume is likewise dedicated to the memory of McNeil, longtime supporter of the study of early America, especially its material dimensions.

A Material World is not the familiar compilation of papers presented at a single conference. Instead, as Boudreau and Lovell describe it, the volume's contents developed through conversations fostered over time. The connections among various chapters by different authors indicate the extent to which informal and formal exchanges of ideas during and after symposiums, workshops, and even garden walks can spark scholarly publications, developed over time as various voices are woven into the dialog. The book is a credit to the type of exchanges fostered at the McNeil Center.

A Material World includes eleven essays divided into five sections: “Canvas and Culture: Portraits in Anglo-America”; “Objects with Meaning”; “Spaces of Power: Houses and Objects”; “Revolutions of Image and Place”; and “Imagining Pasts: Images and Memory in Early America.” Boudreau and Lovell describe two distinct questions that they hope the volume will help answer: “how can we better understand the material world of the colonial and early national period?” and “how can ‘reading’ these objects shed light on significant dimensions of social experience and cultural practices invisible in the written record?” (1). They devised A Material World to provide content about particular subjects and, perhaps more importantly, to expand the role that the material world plays in understanding the past. It succeeds, at least in part, on both fronts.

Boudreau and Lovell have compiled an interesting array of essays on topics ranging from houses and furniture to paintings and prints. However, the contents are heavily weighted toward visual culture. The first three essays explore portrait painting, two later essays focus on other types of images, and other authors use printed or painted illustrations as source material. Boudreau and Lovell note in their introduction that they have purposefully taken this approach, writing “although often treated separately, visual culture . . . is here aggregated into the more encompassing category of material culture, which includes all objects modified or given particular meaning by humans” (3). One wonders, however, if the collection would have been stronger if recast as an analysis of the visual world with a focus on representation. Nevertheless, the contributing authors do take the materiality of visual culture seriously. This is nowhere more evident than in Ellen G. Miles's contribution, “Artists’ Materials and the Transatlantic Craft Traditions of Eighteenth-century American Portrait Painting.”

Given the location at the McNeil Center at the University of Pennsylvania, it is not surprising that about a third of the essays focus on the material culture of Philadelphia and the surrounding region. Material culture is, after all, generally place-based, and analyses require access to the physical things that inform the work. And yet this is not a volume exclusively about Pennsylvania, and the locations covered in the essays are expanded by Lovell, who transports readers to Thomas Jefferson's Monticello in Virginia; Paul G. E. Clemens and Edward S. Cooke Jr, who explore clock making in Connecticut; and Emily A. Murphy, who takes the Derby family's domestic environments in Salem, Massachusetts as her topic. Other authors explore the material and visual cultures of the British colonial world through less geographically specific lenses, extending their scope with broader analyses.

The book's subtitle—“Culture, Society, and the Life of Things in Early Anglo-America”—identifies what may be the book's greatest weakness. Given the current state of the field and contemporary events in the United States and the world, the focus on Anglo-America is quite limited and limiting. Boudreau and Lovell explain that the studies included in the volume address “Britishness,” understood as “a quality with many facets, exported variously to disparate destinations, and morphing in unexpected ways over time and through space” (2). Although people of African descent held in bondage are discussed in the context of Richard Derby's will, and images of Indigenous people appear alongside William Penn and as personifications of America, neither group is the focus of any of the essays, which are predominantly about white men and the objects and representations they created (Jennifer van Horn's “‘Painted’ Face and ‘Dressing’ Tables” and Murphy's “‘The Family of Derby has a Taste in this Way,’” both of which introduce white women as actors, are exceptions).

The lack of attention to diversity is troubling, but there are some methodological successes evidenced in this collection of essays that recommend the volume despite its limitations. The first is that Boudreau and Lovell recognize the need to view objects as parts of sets or assemblages: “In studying object sets, we can learn even more—about regional preferences and variants, habituated practices and inventions, diffusion and change” (3). With this in mind, bringing together various authors—those working in the academy and those working in the field of public history—in a volume such as this is valuable for both authors and readers.

Boudreau and Lovell and the chapters’ authors also stress “the political life of seemingly apolitical objects” (2)—although they might have more accurately written of political lives in the plural. Collectively, the authors of the essays in this volume are willing to move beyond the canon to tackle an array of material things. The concluding section—perhaps the strongest in the volume—dissects the meanings imposed on not only prints and paintings but also less heroic objects such as textile fragments and repurposed house timbers as time has passed and they have become relics and contributed to myths about early America.

As Boudreau and Lovell explain in their introduction, “objects are assaulted or cherished as proxies for people and ideas” (2). While true, this assertion only captures part of what studies of material culture, including the essays included in this volume, can contribute to our knowledge of the past. While associational collections may have employed things as stand-ins for long-dead people and, more rarely, abstract ideas, today we recognize that objects are valuable in their own right. They communicate individually and collectively through their physical presence and tangible characteristics such as materials, technologies, and wear patterns, as well as their representational qualities. A Material World recognizes the value of these attributes while still leaving room for others to further expand on material meaning making, particularly when it comes to the plurality of experiences in early America.