In a plain wooden room outside Albany, two lines of worshippers face each other across a bare floor, men along one wall, women along the other. The benches have been pushed back. A woman in a coarse working dress lifts her voice, and the two lines begin to tremble and turn. It is 1776. She…
The composing table is black with old ink, and the long arm of the press waits in the half-light of a Philadelphia print shop. A merchant in good clothes bends over a sheet of rag paper, writing fast, signing the work with a name that is not his own. It is 1787. He does not…
The window stands open to the meadow, and the room smells of drying ink and pressed leaves. On the table a single sheet holds the drawing of a plant in fine detail, root and stem and leaf and flower, set down by a hand trained to miss nothing. A young woman on a Hudson Valley…
The sheets are stacked to the rafters. Ten thousand copies of a book that is approximately four by six inches, one thousand four hundred and fifty-two pages, small Caslon type in two columns, the whole run set by hand and pressed through a common press one sheet at a time. Outside on Market Street in…
The straw bonnet industry runs on women’s labor. In the farmhouses and kitchen workrooms of Connecticut, women weave straw braid and bonnet crowns on wooden lasts by the light of oil lamps and tallow candles and they sell the finished pieces to merchants who sell them in the cities. It is a real industry and…
It is late evening in a Boston composing room, March 25, 1812. An artist named Elkanah Tisdale has drawn a winged, clawed, salamander-shaped creature on a piece of paper and brought it to the Centinel. The creature is tracing the outline of the new Essex County electoral district, which has been gerrymandered by the governor…
On February 1, 1733, a small English general steps off a ship onto a forty-foot bluff above the Savannah River. A few yards away, the elderly chief of the Yamacraw Creek stands watching with his people. The two men cannot speak to each other. There is no common language between them, no established trade relationship,…
At Coldengham, his estate in the Hudson Valley, the desk holds two kinds of paper. On the left, a Mohawk-English wordlist from his survey work, and notes from fifty years of conversations with Haudenosaunee leaders. On the right, a botanical key from Linnaeus in Sweden and a letter in Latin to a correspondent he has…
The vat house smells like something dying. In August in the South Carolina low country the fermenting indigo plants have been soaking for twelve hours and the liquid is the color of deep water and the smell is of rot and marsh gas and ammonia, and the enslaved workers have been stirring the vats since…
Along the Altamaha River in southeastern Georgia, October 1765, there is a small grove of trees that does not appear in any botanical text. The flowers are white, five-petaled, lightly fragrant, and they are blooming in October when almost nothing else blooms. The leaves around the flowers are turning orange and red and purple at…