by Linda Lee Graham | Life in the 18th Century, Slide, Voices Beckon
Sunday, September 17, 2023, is Constitution Day. It marks the two hundred and thirty-fifth anniversary of the final day of the U.S. Constitutional Convention—the day a miracle occurred on Philadelphia’s Chestnut Street. On this day a gathering of men set aside their...
by Linda Lee Graham | Life in the 18th Century, Slide, Voices Echo
Soldier of the Black Watch c.1740, colorized {{PD-US}} When Malcolm McPherson joined the Black Watch in 1735, he and his fellow enlistees “thought themselves destined to serve exclusively . . . in the Highlands.”1 They had no expectation they’d do duty in...
by Linda Lee Graham | Life in the 18th Century, Slide, Voices Echo
Pimento, a spice more widely known as “allspice,” is harvested from the berries of the Pimenta dioica, a W. Indian tree commonly found on Jamaica’s north coast. It’s not the Spanish red pepper, though its name is derivative of the Spanish pepper (pimiento)...
by Linda Lee Graham | Life in the 18th Century, Slide, Voices Echo
In eighteenth-century Jamaica, a creole was a nonindigenous person born on the island, whether of European, African, or mixed descent. Those referenced in the expression “as rich as a creole,” however, were invariably of European descent. The phrase is a variant of...
by Linda Lee Graham | Life in the 18th Century, Slide, Voices Echo
I did a double take when I saw this work hanging in a Montego Bay exhibit last year. Admittedly, my interest was more than casual. I was writing Voices Echo at the time and visiting Jamaica to flesh out my research. Many of the images in the collage echoed...
by Linda Lee Graham | Life in the 18th Century, Slide, Voices Whisper
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....
