Forget your conventional picture of America in 1810. In the first half of the 19th century, we were not at all the placid, straitlaced, white-picket-fence nation we imagine ourselves to have been. By looking at the patterns of everyday life as recorded by contemporary foreign and native observers of the young republic, and by asking the questions that historians don't think to ask of another time—What were people really like? How did they greet one another in the street? How did they occupy their leisure time? What did they eat?—Jack Larking brings us a portrait of another America, an America that was so different from both our conception of its past life and its present-day reality as to seem a foreign country.
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For generations, it was the mainspring, the proof, and the reward of a civilized social life. Now, a fond student of the ritual looks back on the golden age of the dinner party and tells you just how you should have behaved.
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It’s never a bad thing question how well you’re doing; the problem is to find a judicious observer who is determined neither to flatter, nor to condemn.
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Every presidential election is exciting when it happens. Then, the passing of time usually makes the outcome seem less than crucial. But, after more than a century and a quarter, the election of 1860 retains its terrible urgency.
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He was a capitalist. He was an urban reformer. He was a country boy. He was “Comrade Jesus,” a hardworking socialist. He was the world’s first ad man. For a century and a half, novelists have been trying to recapture the “real” Jesus.
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