The Hammond-Harwood House: A Registered National Historic Landmark

AnonymousProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 2.0
Word count
6K words
Chapters
1

Tags

English Originals Architecture Human GeographyHistorical LandmarksHistoric ArchitectureArchitectural GuideCultural Relics ProtectionFamily MansionIllustrated GuideTravel GuideArchitectural AestheticsColonial America

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.The Hammond-Harwood House: A Registered National Historic Landmark by AnonymousAuthor: Anonymous,Language: English, Class: F106: United States local history: Atlantic coast. Middle Atlantic States, Release Date: May 28, 2019

Editor's review

This is an anonymous introductory text about the Hammond-Harwood House, prepared and released by Project Gutenberg as public-domain material. Located in Annapolis, Maryland, the Hammond-Harwood House is a surviving colonial Georgian mansion later designated a National Historic Landmark. Texts of this kind typically cover the building's exterior, interior layout, decorative details, and the history of the families who built and lived in it, with the aim of helping readers recognize, on site or on paper, the spatial order and period character of an old house. Its value lies not in literary quality but in treating architecture as historical evidence: from the proportions of the portico and the functions of rooms to decorative details, one can read the housing ideals and aesthetic tastes of the mid-eighteenth-century North American colonial elite. It suits background reading before a visit or as supplementary material for courses in architectural history and historic preservation. The style is expository; read it slowly with plans and photographs, building the space in your mind as you go.

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Reading tips

  1. Before reading, find a floor plan or photographs of the house and use them to follow the text room by room.
  2. Take notes linking architectural details to the historical context of eighteenth-century colonial North America.
  3. If visiting in person, read through beforehand and revisit the corresponding passages in room order on site.
  4. Where technical terms are dense, skim first, grasp the sequence of family occupancy and alterations, then return for close reading.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1

FAQ

Is this text an official guidebook? It is a public-domain introductory text prepared by Project Gutenberg with no named author, covering this National Historic Landmark. It is close to an introductory or descriptive resource but should not be equated with the official guidebook currently issued by the house's managing organization. For current opening information and exhibitions, consult the site's institution.
Can I read it without a background in architecture? Yes. The text is mainly introductory, with limited technical terminology, and general readers can understand most of it with the help of photographs and floor plans. When Georgian proportions or decorative terms come up, looking up a keyword or two is enough to keep reading; no systematic training in architectural history is required.
Will reading it help with an actual visit? Yes. Reading beforehand helps you notice the period significance behind the portico, the sequence of rooms, and decorative details instead of merely glancing around. Compare the descriptions with the on-site guide's commentary, paying attention to construction dates, changes of family ownership, and traces of later preservation and restoration.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Anonymous Author

Anonymous is a collective designation used in English-language publishing for works whose authorship is unknown or unsigned, rather than the real name of a single author. The 716 titles attributed to this name include the Gospel of John, Psalms, Romans, Luke, Philippians, and 1 Corinthians from the World English Bible, as well as the Gospel of John and Psalms from the King James Version. Such texts are mainly religious classics and ancient folk traditions that were copied, translated, and compiled over long periods, making their original authors difficult to trace; they therefore circulated anonymously. Public information is limited, and neither nationality nor dates of birth and death can be confirmed. The significance of anonymity lies in focusing attention on the works themselves rather than on authorial identity, and in reminding readers of the collective and variable nature of texts in transmission.