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Abigail Adams

When John Adams was elected President, and Thomas Jefferson Vice President, each came to see the other as a traitor. Out of their enmity grew our modern political system.

The ground rules have changed drastically since 1789. Abigail Adams, stifled in her time, would have loved being First Lady today.

ONCE AGAIN the candidates gear up for a national election; not only the candidates but their wives too. And pity the ladies!
by Charles Ackers Little, Brown and Company 207 pages, $9.95

The prevailing Colonial feeling toward female education was unanimously negative. Learning to read was the first feminist triumph.

Could I have died a martyr in the cause, and thus ensured its success, I could have blessed the faggot and hugged the stake.” The cause was state support for female education, the would-be Saint Joan was Emma Willard, and the rhetorical standards of the 1820’

The courtship and fifty-four-year marriage of John and Abigail Adams was, despite separation and war and tragedy, a moving and highly literate love feast between two "Dearest Friends"

On a cool Massachusetts morning in April, 1764, a girl named Abigail Smith watched anxiously as a servant held a bundle of letters in a fire tongs over a smouldering flame. “Did you never rob a Birds nest?” she wrote her correspondent.

Eighteenth-century equivalents of “Yankee go home!” greeted the Adams family when, in 1785, they arrived in London. Nevertheless, there were certain delightful compensations—especially for an eligible young lady

 

All that the Adamses saw they were schooled to put down and save. The result is a collection of historical records beyond price and without peer.

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