Jack Larkin

Jack Larkin is Chief Historian at Old Sturbridge Village. This article is adapted from his new book The Reshaping of Everyday Life in the United States, 1790-1840, published by Harper & Row.

Articles by this Author

The Secret Life of a Developing Country (Ours), September/October 1988 | Vol. 39, No. 6

Forget your conventional picture of America in 1810. In the first half of the 19th century, we were not at all the placid, straitlaced, white-picket-fence nation we imagine ourselves to have been. By looking at the patterns of everyday life as recorded by contemporary foreign and native observers of the young republic, and by asking the questions that historians don't think to ask of another time—What were people really like? How did they greet one another in the street? How did they occupy their leisure time? What did they eat?—Jack Larking brings us a portrait of another America, an America that was so different from both our conception of its past life and its present-day reality as to seem a foreign country.

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