American Historical and Literary Curiosities: Second Series, Complete

Step into the curious mind of mid-19th-century America, where history and literature collide in the most unexpected ways. J. Jay Smith assembled this cabinet of wonders as a companion to his earlier collection, filling these pages with forgotten Founding Fathers, bizarre literary feuds, ghost stories that haunted the nation, and the peculiar sayings and customs that made antebellum America so strange and alive. Smith writes with the enthusiasm of a man who has stumbled upon a trunk of buried treasures, pulling out one astonishing anecdote after another: a poet whose fame rested on a single stanza, a president whose private letters revealed a man no textbook would recognize, literary scandals that set the newspapers ablaze. This is not the America of textbooks but the America of whispers, legends, and the delightful oddities that slip through the cracks of grand narratives. For readers who hunger for history stripped of its polish, here is America as it was truly lived and remembered in 1847.