Dates in Books

Aged thirty-eight, he landed in Boston in the middle of June 1637 with his wife, Anne, five children, a manservant, and a maid. They settled in Newbury, twenty-five miles north, but this, like Boston, proved too crowded. Within a year Moulton and sixteen others had successfully petitioned the General Court to found a new township across the Merrimack river – what is now Hampton, New Hampshire.

By the end of the 1840s, however, slavery was back on the national agenda with a vengeance – thanks to the vast expansion of America's continental empire war with Mexico and near-war with Britain, which carried the country right across to the gold coast of California. What northerners called "the slave power" was not the only issue inflaming politics – in the early 1850s faith issues came to the fore in a Protestant backlash against the massive wave of Catholic immigrants – but the place of slavery in the land of liberty eventually swept all else aside, including the Union itself.

In the 1830s only two new states entered the Union, Arkansas in the South and Michigan in the North, thereby maintaining the sectional balance.

Westward expansion has forced slavery back onto the political agenda and by the 1850s the issue could no longer be fudged.

At Lafayette, Indiana – some 200 miles from Springfield– he told the crowd:

During the 1850s railroads spread out from New England and New York across the Appalachians to crisscross the states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois.

For years Douglas lobbied relentlessly in Washington for a federal land grant to back a railroad through Illinois. In 1850 Congress gave his state 2.5 million acres – a 200-foot right of way plus alternating sections of land on either side to a depth of six miles.

In June 1644, thirty-two years after he had started work on his common-place book, Smith was widowed, at the age of sixty-three.

The 1850s equivalent of the Erie Canal was the Illinois Central Railroad, which ran 700 miles north from the southern tip of the state at Cairo, on the junction of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, and included a branch line into Chicago. Built between 1852 and 1856 at a cost of nearly $27 million, it was dubbed the longest railway in the world.

During the 1840s railroad building eclipsed canal construction; by 1860 the United States had over 30,000 miles of track, compared with roughly 4,000 miles of canals.

Nor did the railroads suddenly supplant canals and riverboats, especially for heavy freight like coal: The peak year for tonnage on the Erie Canal was not until 1872.

In June 1633 a rising Dutch painter took a journey north into the countryside of Friesland, and in the warm summer air made a tiny sketch of the twenty-one-year-old Saskia van Uylenburgh, the orphaned daughter of a prominent lawyer.

His entries for 1647 record constant conflict at home:

On June 7 Adams and Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, judging the moment right, proposed a resolution in the Congress: "That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved."

Around ten o'clock in the evening, going before after a much-needed breath of air, "I found suspended, on either side of the cabin, three long tiers of hanging bookshelves, designed apparently for volumes of the small octavo size. Looking with greater attention at these contrivances (wondering to find such literary preparations in such a place), I descried on each shelf a sort of microscopic sheet and blanket; them I began dimly to comprehend that the passengers were the library, and that they were to be arranged edge-wise on these shelves till morning."

Alongside the tracks stood the ubiquitous poles carrying wires for the telegraph – another technological marvel of the age, pioneered in America by Samuel Morse in the 1830s.

Although Britain had pioneered steam railways, America soon led the world: By 1840 it already had 3,300 miles of track – the same figure as for canals – and this track mileage was nearly double the figure for the whole of Europe.