Recommended Reading List

I've been reading quite a bit lately, seeing what I can learn about the time periods I research. A knowledge of history is so important in the field of genealogy. The more you learn about the way people lived their day-to-day lives, the better able you are to understand the choices these individuals made and why.

Amongst the mass of books I've ordered in the past year, I found a wonderful series that focuses on the day-to-day life of people from various time periods in America. They are a treasure trove of information. I'm currently on the third book in the series and it's just as good, if not better than the one before it.

Even though they are written by different authors, the three I've read so far are all very well written, informative & not easy to put down. I highly recommend the "Everyday Life in America Series".

1) "Everyday Life in Early America" by David F. Hawke
2) "The Reshaping of Everyday Life: 1790-1840" By Jack Larkin
3) "Expansion of Everyday Life: 1860-1876" by Daniel Sutherland

4) "Victorian America: Transformations in Everyday Life, 1876-1915" By Thomas J. Schlereth

5) "The Uncertainty of Everyday Life: 1915-1945" By Harvey Green

6) "As Various as Their Land: The Everyday Lives of 18th Century Americans" By Stephanie Grauman Wolf

If you're interested in Colonial Medicine and Doctors, here's a good book on that topic.

"The Doctor in Colonial America" By Zacharry B. Friedenberg

This book is full of information about how they practiced medicine in the colonial period, which includes the Revolutionary War. It's not one of those books that's filled with medical terms, but accessible & simply understood language by an author who is also a doctor himself. He writes about amputations without anestesia, war wounds, sanitation controversies, bleeding, scurvy (and it's somewhat accidental treatment), dysentary, smallpox, inoculations, strange diagnosis, probable misdiagnosis, treatments that include such things as mercury and so much more...

Happy Reading!