Situated at the vital intersection of physiology, gastronomy, decorum, knowledge-production, and labor, recipes from the past allow us to understand the significant ways that kitchen work was an intellectual and creative enterprise.

Or so the story has long been told. Inventing the "American Way" challenges this vision of inevitable consensus.

Examining a wide range of published material including sonnets, pageants, prefaces, narrative poems, and title pages, Wendy Wall considers how the idea of authorship was shaped by the complex social controversies generated by publication ...

In this book Wendy Wall argues that representations of housework in the early modern period helped to forge crucial conceptions of national identity.

The text uses the theme of innovation-- the impulse in American history to "make it new"-- to integrate the political, economic, social, and cultural dimensions of the American story.

The Study Guide contains chapter objectives and outlines, short-answer and essay questions, and chronologies that support students as they work through the text.