The Olden Time Series: Vol. 2: The Days of the Spinning-Wheel in New England: Gleanings Chiefly from Old Newspapers of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts

Henry M. Brooks was doing archaeology in 1886, but instead of digging for pottery he was digging through old newspapers. The result is a resurrection of New England life before the machine age, when every household had a spinning wheel and 'industry' meant something done by hand rather than by factory. Brooks compiles anecdotes from Boston and Salem papers to capture the frugality, the peculiar fashion choices, the social customs, and the economic anxieties of colonial and early republican America. What makes this volume sing is its double layer of nostalgia: Brooks is already mourning a world that was vanishing in his own time, watching spinning wheels become parlor curiosities and the Republic's simple virtues give way to modern pianos and whatever passed for progress in the Gilded Age. This is not dry history. It is the texture of ordinary lives, the particular way a 1750s Bostonian thought about cloth and God and their neighbors. For readers who want history with skin on it, these newspaper gleanings deliver.