Colonial Living

Colonial Living, Edwin Tunis's vigorous re-creation of 17th- and 18th-century America, examines the everyday lives of those sturdy men and women who transplanted European culture to the New World.
Long research and love for his subject gave Tunis an intimate knowledge of the details of colonial experience, from earliest coastal settlement to the revolutionary era. He shares all with his reader - the building of houses, with their trunnels, girts, and hand-hewn beams; the spinning of yarn and its weaving and dyeing; the making of candles and soap; and the intricate business of cooking on the open hearth with lug poles, cranes, bake kettles, and spits. He describes the early crops and illustrates the implements and animals used to produce them. In detailed pictures, Tunis shows us the tools and products of the craftsmen - the blacksmith, the cooper, the miller, the joiner, and the silversmith.

Colonial Living, Edwin Tunis's vigorous re-creation of 17th- and 18th-century America, examines the everyday lives of those sturdy men and women who transplanted European culture to the New World. In lively text and detailed drawings, we see the earliest American-Indian-inspired huts of New England's first white settlers and the houses they learned to build to survive the cruel winters; the snug Dutch and Flemish farmhouses of Nieuw Amsterdam; the homes of the early Southern planters--along with those of African Americans, whose labor fueled the staple-crop economy.

Long research and love for his subject gave Tunis an intimate knowledge of the details of colonial experience, from earliest coastal settlement to the revolutionary era. He shares all with his readers: the building of houses, with their trunnels, girts, and hand-hewn beams; the spinning of yarn and its weaving and dyeing; the making of candles and soap; and the intricate business of cooking on the open hearth with lug poles, cranes, bake kettles, and spits. He describes the early crops and illustrates the implements and animals used to produce them. In detailed pictures, Tunis shows us the tools and products of the craftsmen--the blacksmith, the cooper, the miller, the joiner, and the silversmith.

Edwin Tunis brought the past to life with consummate skill. Rich in enjoyment, rich in information, with more than 200 drawings, his book is a warm, lively, and authentic panorama of a lost way of life.