Author: christopherbgordon

Self-taught in her invalid father’s bookshop, she compiled the first American reference work on the world’s religions and became among the first American women to live entirely by her pen.

On a single deed recorded at the Northumberland District Court in 1791, a Virginia planter named 452 enslaved people and bound himself to set every one of them free.

Massachusetts banned the stage, so she published her political plays as pamphlets and named the loyalists anyway. The first full history of the Revolution was written by a woman who lived it.

London, 1789. He walked door to door selling subscriptions to his own life. He had bought his freedom twenty-three years earlier for forty pounds. Then he wrote the book.

Boston, 1772. Eighteen of the colony’s most respected men sat a nineteen-year-old enslaved girl down and questioned her until they believed she had written her own poems. Then they signed a paper saying so.

Philadelphia, 1770. A French-born Quaker schoolteacher taught the children the colony would not educate, wrote the pamphlets the reformers needed, and died with Black and white mourners walking together at his funeral.

Philadelphia, June 1780. She wrote a broadside signed “An American Woman,” sent women door to door, raised three hundred thousand dollars, and signed each shirt inside with the name of the woman who made it.

Germantown, 1763. He printed Scripture in the language his neighbors actually spoke. Soldiers seized his press and turned his Bibles into cartridge paper. The Bibles survived.

Hallowell, Maine, 1790. She delivered 816 babies. She kept a diary for twenty-seven years. She wrote down the work because the work deserved a record.

Oella, Maryland, 1790. A man on a tobacco farm taught himself astronomy in his fifties, sent his almanac to Thomas Jefferson with a letter, and let the math do the arguing.