Home Life in Colonial Days

Alice Morse Earle wanted to know how the American colonists actually lived, so she wrote about the lean-tos and log houses they threw together on arrival, the open hearths they cooked at, the flax they broke and spun, the candles they dipped, the pewter and china on the shelf, the schoolrooms, the meals and the games children invented. She worked from diaries, letters, probate inventories and the objects themselves, at a time when most historians thought domestic life beneath notice. The result, first published in 1898, is still handed to museum staff and reenactors because Earle bothered to record the small practical facts everyone else assumed would keep. Available here as a free PDF and EPUB.