On March 5, 2019, a ruckus erupted in the New Hampshire state legislature when lawmakers wore strings of pearls to support a gun-rights advocacy group. The supporters of gun control felt mocked as pearl clutchers, while the adorned lawmakers and the gun-possession advocates they were supporting claimed they wore the necklaces as badges of conservatism. This little bit of local drama highlights the complexities embodied in our understandings of pearls, which Molly Warsh seeks to elucidate in American Baroque. She shows that pearls have global significance as an important catalyst to a variety of human behaviors.
Warsh manages to cover two centuries and touch on a wide variety of topics in a concise volume. While the book broaches environmental history, technological exoticism, slavery, and many other subjects that relate to pearls, Warsh pursues her argument that pearls “gave rise to a productive tension between vernacular, small-scale understandings of wealth...
