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Valentine's Day

There never was a time for valentines like the Nineteenth Century, those proper old days when love peeped out through clouds of lace and sentiment and not an analyst had appeared to tell us why we felt that way. On these pages is a little remembrance of that perfumed era when a valentine was prepared with pain and opened with blushes.
The captivating examples of romantic nineteenth-century valentines on these pages are the handiwork of a lady unusual for her time. Esther Howland was born in 1828 in Worcester, Massachusetts, to Southworth A.

How the colossus of the “social expression industry” always manages to say it better than you do

FROM A DISTANCE , it looks like any other factory scene. Women, seated at small tables, hunch over piecework, their hands moving in quick, accustomed ways.

Thus Margaret Winthrop to her spouse, the governor of the Bay Colony. Her letters—and John’s in reply—reveal behind the cold Puritan exterior a warm and deeply touching relationship

 

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