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The Hardwick Historical Society, in Hardwick VT, will host author Thomas C. Hubka (author of Big House, Little House, Back House, Barn and Resplendent Synagogue) for a lecture and discussion of his book How the Working Class Home Became Modern, 1900-1940 (University of Minnesota Press, Dec. 2020). After the talk, there will be a Q&A session and book signing. Books will be available for purchase on-site.
In How the Working-Class Home Became Modern, 1900–1940, Hubka analyzes a period when millions of average Americans saw accelerated improvement in their housing and domestic conditions. These improvements were intertwined with the acquisition of entirely new mechanical conveniences, new types of rooms and patterns of domestic life, and such innovations—from public utilities and kitchen appliances to remodeled and multi-unit housing—are at the center of the story Hubka tells. It is a narrative, amply illustrated and finely detailed, that traces changes in household hygiene, sociability, and privacy practices that launched large portions of the working classes into the middle class—and that, in Hubka’s telling, reconfigures and enriches the standard account of the domestic transformation of the American home.
Big House, Little House, Back House, Barn portrays the four essential components of the stately and beautiful connected farm buildings made by nineteenth-century New Englanders that stand today as a living expression of a rural culture, offering insights into the people who made them and their agricultural way of life. A visual delight as well as an engaging tribute to our nineteenth-century forebears, this book, first published nearly forty years ago, has become one of the standard works on regional farmsteads in America. The new edition features a new preface by the author.
Hubka, an architectural historian known for his work on American vernacular architecture, immersed himself in medieval and early-modern Jewish history, religion, and culture to prepare for this remarkable study of the eighteenth-century Polish synagogue in the town of Gwozdziec, now in present Ukraine. Hubka selected the Gwozdziec Synagogue—one of the finest examples of a small-town wooden synagogue from the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth—because of the completeness of its photographic and historical records. This truly resplendent synagogue exemplified a high point in Jewish architectural art and religious painting, a tradition that was later abandoned by Eastern-European Jewish communities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Because the Gwozdziec Synagogue, like so many others, was destroyed by the Nazis, this book revives a spiritual community lost to history. Graced with nearly 200 historical photographs, architectural drawings, maps, diagrams, and color illustrations, Resplendent Synagogue vividly recreates the spiritual heart of a once-vibrant Jewish community. Hubka “reads” the synagogue both as a historical document and as a cultural artifact. His interpretation of its art and architecture—and its liturgy—enables him to recreate a pre-modern Jewish community seen in relation to both its internal traditions of worship and its external relations with Gentile neighbors. Hubka demonstrates that while the architectural exterior of the synagogue was largely the product of non-Jewish, regional influences, the interior design and elaborate wall-paintings signified a distinctly Jewish art form. The collaboration of Jewish and Gentile builders, craftsmen, and artists in the creation of this magnificent wooden structure attests to an eighteenth century period of relative prosperity and communal well-being for the Jews of Gwozdziec. This unique exploration of a lost religious and cultural artifact breathes new life into a forgotten but fascinating aspect of eighteenth-century Polish Jewry and is certain to incite discussion and debate among modern readers.
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