Americana Insights 2025, edited by Lisa Minardi

Americana Insights 2025
edited by Lisa Minardi
Americana Insights, distributed by University of Pennsylvania Press, 321 pp., hardcover $64.95

It’s not often that a monumental tome comes along to update and correct the hundred-year-old record of a folk art form. Devoted exclusively to Pennsylvania German redware pottery, volume three of the Americana Insights series examines the work of the most notable potters working in southeastern Pennsylvania in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries and offers new insight and research by 11 leading scholars on the subject.

The book opens with an overview of redware production using Old World techniques and designs, providing readers with detailed illustrations of the potter’s tools.

Following is a series of engaging essays on famous early makers like Georg Hubener, Samuel Troxel, “The Potter Once Known as Solomon Grim,” Conrad Mumbauer, John Monday, Simon Singer, and the Medinger and Neiffer potteries, ending with 20th-century revivalist potter Mildred Keyser. The essays provide biographical information on the potters, consider their position in the evolution of the craft, and note their influence on other potters whose names are unknown. Also included are brief articles on postmaster and potter Nathaniel Sellers, hunting scene inkstands, the Huber pottery in Montgomery County, and the work of Henry Chapman Mercer. Each author provides extensive endnotes.

Each essay is accompanied by eye-popping full-color photographs, some filling the entire 8½-by-11-inch page. The images clearly illustrate a variety of favorite Pennsylvania German motifs, including tulips and other flowers, urns and other vessels, foliage, birds, deer, hearts, geometric shapes, stars, military figures, and patriotic symbols, as well as inscriptions encircling the central motif. Some of the images from private collections are published here for the first time.

The editor has included appendices on signed redware pottery to help collectors and researchers, published studies of Pennsylvania earthenware pottery, and Montgomery County potters. The work concludes with an index.

Americana Insights 2025 is sure to serve far into the future as an invaluable reference on Pennsylvania German redware potters and as a visual treat for the collector and casual reader alike.

John K. Robinson
Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission, ret.