Publishers Weekly reviews Voices Whisper
I'm trilled to share Publishers Weekly recent review of Voices Whisper! Below is an excerpt, and you'll find the full review at Publishers Weekly.Graham continues the adventures of three British immigrants to late 18th-century America in this enjoyable follow-up to...
Coffee for Two
Early coffeepots were designed to hold only a cup or two of coffee. It was only once coffee became less expensive and easy to obtain that the pots increased in size. The gem pictured (figuratively speaking—you can find one similar on eBay for under $10) is an example...
A Well-Travelled Cobblestone
The story of well-traveled cobblestones paving America's streets is a romantic one. But is it true? Did ballast rock from foreign ports pave America’s colonial seaport streets? Ballast Ballast is what's carried in a ship’s hull so the ship doesn’t topple. Because an...
Broadsides – Trash Tabloids of Days Past
Yesterday's Tabloids Simple and cheap, broadsides were a common means of communication for close to three hundred years, up through the early 1800s. They were first used to post notices of royal proclamations and later expanded into notices of events, advertisements,...
Wilson’s December 15th Introductory Law Lecture
James Wilson’s law lecture series was not the nation’s first law course. It was, however, the first significant law course to be established in America since the Constitution was ratified, and the series had the distinction of being held in the nation’s new, albeit...
An Eighteenth-Century Luxury: Books
Just how expensive were books for the average Philadelphian in the 1780s? I've read they were a luxury, however learning an edition of The History of Ancient Greece, from the earliest time until the time it became a Roman province, by William Robertson, Esq. with a...
Masquerades a Public Nuisance?
Masked balls of the eighteenth century fostered all sorts of illicit amusements. The events, both commercial and private, were seen by some as an opportunity to freely engage in unseemly behavior while maintaining anonymity. They were enormously popular—in...
Lending Libraries
The demand for reading material kept pace with the growing rate of literacy in British North America, and by the last half of the eighteenth century Philadelphia boasted a small number of lending libraries to meet it. One of the public libraries was Thomas Bradford's...