The Association of Philadelphia Tour Guides (APT) will hold its next Zoom book club meeting on May 20 at 7 pm. All are welcome to attend. The book selection is Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World by Zara Anishanslin.

Through the story of a portrait of a woman in a silk dress, historian Zara Anishanslin embarks on a fascinating journey, exploring and refining debates about the cultural history of the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world. While most scholarship on commodities focuses either on labor and production or on consumption and use, Anishanslin unifies both, examining the worlds of four identifiable people who produced, wore, and represented this object: a London weaver, one of early modern Britain’s few women silk designers, a Philadelphia merchant’s wife, and a New England painter.

Blending macro and micro history with nuanced gender analysis, Anishanslin shows how making, buying, and using goods in the British Atlantic created an object-based community that tied its inhabitants together, while also allowing for different views of the Empire. Investigating a range of subjects including self-fashioning, identity, natural history, politics, and trade, Anishanslin makes major contributions both to the study of material culture and to our ongoing conversation about how to write history.

APT members will find Zoom details in the Tour Talk newsletter the week of the meeting. Non-APT members who would like to participate in the May book club should email APT Secretary Pam Covey at secretary@phillyguides.org no later than 5 pm the day of the meeting to receive the Zoom link.  Please join us!