The Reshaping of Everyday Life, 1790–1840

A fascinating history of the daily lives of Americans in the first fifty years of the new republic, told often in their own words. The years between the patrician leadership of George Washington and the campaign that elected William Henry Harrison marked a period of startling changes in American life. However, most American were enmeshed in the myriad ordinary concerns of their lives, and although deeply affected by the great events of the time, their concern with them was intermittent. Jack Larkin describes the often gritty texture of life as these Americans experienced it, weaving the disparate threads of everyday life into the rich, complicated tapestry of American history during this transitional period. "Recounting the customs and styles of life of ordinary people during a period of rapid and unsettling social and economic change, Jack Larkin, the chief historian at Old Sturbridge Village, the outdoor history museum in Sturbridge, Mass., illuminates an astonishing range of activities. These include infant feeding; the care of chamber pots, privies and grave yards; the use of broadside ballads, parlor songs and communal dances; the celebration of holidays and routines of travel; the production, design and use of clothing and household items; even the treatment of pets. Habits of speech and manners are sketched, as well as broad patterns of work, religion, sexuality and family life. Virtually all human activity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries comes in for scrutiny in this compact and insightful work." — The New York Times Book Review "Jack Larkin has retrieved the irretrievable; the intimate facts of everyday life that defined what people were really like." — American Heritage