A look back becomes a present for the present

Published 3:48 pm Tuesday, July 22, 2008

By Staff
The Berrien County Republican Women's Club contributed the book, "Houses of the Founding Fathers: the men who made American and the way they lived" to the St. Joseph/Maud Preston Palenske Memorial Library, the Benton Harbor Public Library, the Niles District Library, the Coloma Public Library and the New Buffalo Township Public Library.
Through this project, the Women's Club hopes to contribute to the citizenship education of this community.
"Houses of the Founding Fathers" by Hugh Howard with original photography by Roger Straus III takes on an eye-opening tour of 40 eighteenth-century houses. It shows the mansions of Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton and many other signers of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. The grand story of the revolution emerges from unique and individual domestic perspectives.
The founding fathers are brought to life in the rituals of birth and death, the food they ate, the archaic medical practices they endured, their household arrangements and the way their slaves lived.
"Houses of the Founding Fathers" offers a penetrating look at the private lives of the men whose ideas ignited an insurrection against England and who helped create the modern world.