"In this clearly written volume, Hawke provides enlightening and colorful descriptions of early Colonial Americans and debunks many widely held assumptions about 17th century settlers."--Publishers Weekly

Discusses the different forms of entertainment during Colonial times, including sports, games, music, and theater.

Examines in detail the topics of architecture, clothing, marriage, family life, economy, arts, and government for each region of colonial America.

Science and technology are central to history of the United States, and this is true of the Colonial period as well. Although considered by Europeans as a backwater, the people living in the American colonies had advanced notions of agriculture, surveying, architecture, and other technologies. In areas of natural philosophy—what we call science—such figures as Benjamin Franklin were admired and respected in the scientific capitals of Europe. This book covers all aspects of how science and technology impacted the everyday life of Americans of all classes and cultures. Science and Technology in Everyday Life in Colonial America covers a wide range of topics that will interest students of American history and the history of science and technology: * Domestic technology—how colonial women devised new strategies for day-to-day survival * Agricultural—how Native Americans and African slaves influenced the development of a American system of agriculture * War—how the frequent battles during the colonial period changed how industry made consumer goods This volume includes myriad examples of the impact science and technology had on the lives of individual who lived in the New World.

Since the early decades of the eighteenth century, European, and especially British, thinkers were preoccupied with questions of taste. Whether Americans believed that taste was innate—and therefore a marker of breeding and station—or acquired—and thus the product of application and study—all could appreciate that taste was grounded in, demonstrated through, and confirmed by reading, writing, and looking. It was widely believed that shared aesthetic sensibilities connected like-minded individuals and that shared affinities advanced the public good and held great promise for the American republic. Exploring the intersection of the early republic's material, visual, literary, and political cultures, Catherine E. Kelly demonstrates how American thinkers acknowledged the similarities between aesthetics and politics in order to wrestle with questions about power and authority. Judgments about art, architecture, literature, poetry, and the theater became an arena for considering political issues ranging from government structures and legislative representation to qualifications for citizenship and the meaning of liberty itself. Additionally, if taste prompted political debate, it also encouraged affinity grounded in a shared national identity. In the years following independence, ordinary women and men reassured themselves that taste revealed larger truths about an individual's character and potential for republican citizenship. Did an early national vocabulary of taste, then, with its privileged visuality, register beyond the debates over the ratification of the Constitution? Did it truly extend beyond political and politicized discourse to inform the imaginative structures and material forms of everyday life? Republic of Taste affirms that it did, although not in ways that anyone could have predicted at the conclusion of the American Revolution.

A valuable and compelling portrait of the daily life of Americans during the Victorian era--the fourth volume in the Everyday Life in America series

American colonists knew just two types of public building: churches and taverns. At a time when drinking water was considered dangerous, everyone drank often and in quantity. The author explores the role of drinking and tavern sociability.

Provides information about many aspects of everyday life in the 1800s, covering speech and slang, transportation, household goods, clothing, occupations, money, health and medicine, food and tobacco, amusements, courtship and marriage, slavery, the Civil War, crime, and the wild west.

"In this clearly written volume, Hawke provides enlightening and colorful descriptions of early Colonial Americans and debunks many widely held assumptions about 17th century settlers."--Publishers Weekly