History's ideal should be the story of all people and all thought.  From our earliest days we are taught that history began as soon as people began to write down information.  However, even in the most literate societies very few people ever actually write anything or are the subjects of written material.  The world of artifacts–items that were made or used or both–can fill in this gap, challenging us with as many questions as written material, and providing answers as well.  Often, in the absence of writing, artifacts are all there is to provide us with these answers.  The work of Henry Glassie relies on this proposition, and upon one specific type of artifact–the building.
        In Folk Housing in Middle Virginia, Glassie surveys about 200 buildings in Louisa County in the heart of the Virginia countryside, states his theories and methods of understanding them and their significance, and draws historical conclusions.  His method, which he calls a "structural" approach, looks closely at the form each artifact takes and the rules by which it is made.  Glassie attempts to know the rules of "grammar" (his metaphor) that governed the form of the unspoken "sentences" that are his houses (Camille Wells' metaphor).  For instance, he first makes the basic observation that every building he surveyed for the book uses a geometric square or some variation thereof.  On this basis, he divides the houses into group X, which uses a full square, group Y, which uses less than a full square, and Z, which adds to it.  He gives less attention to changes in fashion and to practical matters.  His analytical system is sound, but poorly explained; his use of the word "competence" for the ability to build is very confusing.  His system relies heavily on charts and tables explaining the interrelationships of his form classifications; for some unknown reason these charts are handwritten, making them hard to comprehend.
        All this is a pity, because even if Glassie's method is hard to follow, his basic premise is brilliant, and his conclusions are quite challenging.  It is hard to see how he got to point B from point A, but the gist of point B is this: In Louisa County, as in other areas all over the world, a more impersonal society led to more impersonal architecture, and a high value put on individuality leads paradoxically to more, rather than less, architectural conformity.  This is because, as he puts it, "No builder works in a vacuum."  There were many variations on the central passage plan with living space to either side (which he classifies as the XY3X form), but as the seventeenth century turned into the eighteenth and the unknowns in the settlers' lives became larger, visitors to a settler's house did not enter into a living space directly through the front door, but into a "hall."  This was all the more unusual because the hall, unlike the aforementioned front doors and living spaces, was not something a house really needed to have, and thus is not sufficiently explained by practical considerations (which do explain, for instance, why the houses were built out of a particular material).  I understood this position much better when I heard Glassie explain it in person than in this book, in which I found the correlation of his data and his conclusion often hard to follow.