San Antonio College Library

Recounts the customs and styles of life of ordinary people between 1790 and 1840.

Recreates the first days of our nationhood through the lives of a Massachusetts merchant, a Delaware yeoman farmer, etc.

When the pressures of early 1800s westward expansion and debt threaten to destroy everything he's built, a troubled Revolutionary War veteran embarks on an audacious plan involving setting one of his male slaves as his breeding sire.

Potter was a freeborn black woman who, as a hairdresser, was in a unique position to hear about, receive confidences from, and observe wealthy white women--and she recorded it all in a revelatory book that delighted Cincinnati's gossip columnists at the time. But more important is Potter's portrait of herself as a wage-earning woman, proud of her work, who earned high pay and accumulated quite a bit of money as one of the nation's earliest "beauticians"...

"William Wirt practiced law in Virginia and Maryland in the early national period and served as attorney general under James Monroe and John Quincy Adams. Elizabeth Wirt managed the household and cared for the Wirts' large family during her husband's frequent work-related absences. For more than three decades, the Wirts struggled to reconcile their different daily pursuits with their commitment to marriage as a partnership of equals. In Marriage in...