It was a crude, raw, hard-drinking, hard-fighting country, a place of brutal diversions and inscrutable customs. It was America in the first half of the nineteenth century, and it was not at all the tranquil, simple, rural republic that is so firmly lodged in the popular imagination. In a triumphant feat of the most challenging sort of historical research, Jack Larkin has retrieved the irretrievable: the intimate facts of everyday life that defined what people were really like, the all-important minutiae that almost nobody bothered to record. Larkin will introduce you to those who came before you, and they’re likely to make you a little uncomfortable.