3
Jedidiah Morse, father of the inventor of the telegraph, Samuel F. B. Morse, complained in his American Geography (1789) that in Albany, New York, all the houses were constructed with projecting "watergutters or spouts," a custom that made it "almost dangerous to walk the streets in a rainy day."
4
In the 1740s in Wethersfield, Connecticut, a town near Hartford, women were employed to prepare onions for sale by tying them in bunches. Historian Gloria L. Main writes that these women workers were paid not in cash but rather in "store merchandise, mostly luxury imports." One woman's payment took the form of "a copy of Homer's Iliad."
These intimate details about life in the young republic--variations in house design, the specifics of a barter economy--paint a picture of early American society that we don't often see. How do such portraits of ordinary American life help us understand American Cookery by Amelia Simmons? Find out this November in our new book from University of Massachusetts Press, United Tastes: The Making of the First American Cookbook.