The First American Hotels
In the eighteenth century, if people in British North America had to travel, they stayed at public houses that were often just repurposed private homes.
To the Lighthouses: A Path to Nationhood
Instilling confidence among merchants and ship captains was an area in which most agreed the new federal authority could and should act.
The Female Husband is So Eighteenth Century
Henry Fielding's novel, a fictional account of the life of Charles Hamilton, conflates vagrancy with sexual, gender, and religious deviance.
Gouverneur Morris’s Secret Sex Diary
The author of the preamble to the Constitution spent years in Europe as a businessman, diplomat, and connoisseur of the pleasures of the flesh.
The Posthumous Mystique of Thomas Chatterton
He died young of suicide and became the quintessence of the tormented poet. But his death may have been an accident, and his greatest work, forgeries.
The Bluestockings
Meet the original Bluestockings, a group of women intellectuals. Their name would eventually become a misogynist epithet -- but it didn't start that way.
The Magic Lantern Shows that Influenced Modern Horror
Eighteenth and early nineteenth century audiences were delighted and horrified by these spectral apparitions conjured in dark rooms.
When Did Colonial America Gain Linguistic Independence?
By the time the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, did colonial Americans still sound like their British counterparts?
Debtors’ Prisons, Class, and Patriotism in 18th Century Ireland
In a paper for Eighteenth-Century Ireland, Martyn J. Powell discusses the politics that seem to have limited the use of debtors' prisons in Ireland.