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An Ordinary Life in 1776
Paperback
Colonial Period (1600-1775)General World History
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Publisher: Nell Quillen
Pages: 178
Weight: 0.54
Height: 0.38 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Forget the room in Philadelphia. This is the year 1776 from the kitchen door - what Americans ate, wore, paid, read, and believed while history happened somewhere else.
Two and a half million people lived in the thirteen colonies in the year the Declaration was written, and almost none of them were in the room. They woke in the dark and dealt with the fire before anything else. They drank cider at breakfast, ate corn and salt pork for months on end, treated illness with methods that often made it worse, walked or rode everywhere, and owned two or three shirts. One person in five was not free to leave.
AN ORDINARY LIFE IN 1776 is a plain-spoken tour of the material world of that year - curious, concrete, and unsentimental. It does not romanticize the eighteenth century, and it does not pretend to know more than the evidence allows. Where historians disagree, the book says so. Where the records are thin or biased, it says that too, and explains why so many confident numbers about this period should be treated with caution.
WHAT IS INSIDE
- What time people woke, how they told the hour without clocks, and what light actually cost
- Why breakfast was so often cider or small beer - and why the usual explanation is only half right
- The food year: corn, pork, salt, the mill, and the hungry stretch that came in March, not January
- What a sick person could expect, from bleeding and blistering to smallpox inoculation
- Height, marriage age, family size, and how children were mourned and buried
- Farm work, the trades, and what an apprentice's indenture forbade him to do
- A woman's day from dark to dark, and what coverture meant for the property she brought
- The labor the whole economy rested on, described without euphemism
- Why no one can honestly convert a 1776 price into today's money
- Roads, ferries, post riders, newspapers, and the tavern where the news was read aloud
- Who could read, what they read, and why signature counts mislead
- Clothing, houses, Sunday, amusements, and what the war looked like from a farmhouse
- Native nations in 1776 as political actors with their own war and their own reasons
PERFECT FOR
- Readers who love social history and everyday detail more than battles and dates
- Teachers, homeschoolers, and students wanting context beyond the Declaration
- Reenactors, living-history volunteers, and historical novelists hunting for texture
- Readers marking America's 250th year who want the ordinary story underneath it
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