Uncanny Revivals: Designing an American Identity

An examination of how immersive colonial revival projects contributed to the formation of a White nationalist identity by inviting viewers to step into the past

From 1930 to 1950, a number of design projects in the United States appeared to bring early American history to life. Sites and artworks such as Colonial Williamsburg, the Winterthur Museum, the Index of American Design, and Narcissa Niblack Thorne's miniature period rooms created immersive fantasies of the past in which visitors seemed to have direct contact with the look and feel of history. Accessible and entertaining for general audiences, these popular projects also had the unsettling effect of naturalizing political ideologies of racial inequality.

K. L. H. Wells examines the ways that colonial revival design produced new racial identifications in which the nation's European immigrant communities and "old stock" Americans transformed from being seen as individual groups differentiated by region, ethnicity, and class to a White race with shared ties to early American history. Drawing on an astonishing breadth of archival sources--including letters from designers and audiences, working drawings and documentary photographs, government and corporate reports, magazine articles and newspaper reviews, and exhibition catalogues and guidebooks--Wells offers a revelatory look at how the affective dimensions of visual and material cultures in colonial revival design contributed to the making of twentieth-century American whiteness.