What a 13-year-old sees this morning

1776 · Pamphlet

The long argument. Cheap, small enough for a pocket, and often printed without the writer's name, because the charge was treason.

• Common Sense

  Thomas Paine. Philadelphia, January 1776. Plain words: a king is not a father, and the colonies should separate.

  Passed from hand to hand and read aloud in kitchens and taverns. How many copies were printed is not known. Paine said 120,000 in a few months. Later claims ran as high as 500,000. Careful counts put a ceiling near 75,000, and some put the likely run between 35,000 and 50,000. The desk will not turn that argument into a percentage of the population.

  Scored91

• The American Crisis

  Thomas Paine, December 1776. It opens, "These are the times that try men's souls."

  Washington had it read to the troops before they crossed to Trenton. A boy was not in the boat. In a camp town he could hear the sentence.

  Scored91

1776 · Broadside

One sheet, one side. The breaking news. Nailed to a wall, a tree, or a tavern door, and read out loud.

• The Dunlap broadside

  John Dunlap, Philadelphia, the night of July 4 into July 5. The first printing of the Declaration. It did not yet carry the signers' names.

  Congress ordered copies sent to the assemblies and to the army. The usual estimate is about two hundred sheets, not a stack in every house. John Nixon read it in the State House yard on July 8. It was read to the army in New York on July 9. A town heard it. A farm off the post road might not hear it for weeks. Two hundred sheets are not seventy percent of the people.

  Scored93

• A song sheet

  Lyrics only, no notes. A line at the top said which old tune to use.

  A peddler sold it for a penny. You already knew the British tune, so you could sing the new words that afternoon.

  Scored90

1776 · Newspaper

A few dozen papers, small runs, openly on a side. Towns copied one another. Nobody pretended the sheet was neutral.

• The Pennsylvania Evening Post

  Benjamin Towne, Philadelphia.

  The first paper to print the full Declaration, on July 6. A child did not buy it. He heard it from the tavern door.

  Scored90

• The Massachusetts Spy

  Isaiah Thomas. He had already moved the press out of Boston.

  Sharp, pictorial, anti-British. The early fights, told so a town would stay angry.

  Scored90

• The Connecticut Courant

  Hartford.

  When occupation shut papers in Boston and New York, an inland sheet still carried the war.

  Scored90

• Pennsylvanischer Staatsbote

  Henrich Miller, Philadelphia. German.

  On July 5 he reported that Congress had declared the colonies free. On July 9 he printed a German text of the Declaration. Steiner and Cist, who had already printed Common Sense in German, put out a German broadside that week. A German-speaking house was not left outside the sentence.

  Scored90

• The Loyalist sheet

  James Rivington's New York Gazetteer had been the loud paper for the king.

  Patriots wrecked his shop in 1775 and he left. The argument did not vanish. In a town the British held, the paper could say the other thing. A child heard whichever army was in the street.

  Scored90

1776 · Almanac

Beside the Bible, the book most houses actually kept. Weather, planting, money tables, a joke, and often a political essay dressed as the calendar.

• Poor Richard's Almanack

  Benjamin Franklin wrote it from 1732 to 1758. By 1776 the name was still in the house, in other men's hands.

  Hung on a nail. Used all year. Not a story you finished. A tool you lived with.

  Scored91

• Bickerstaff's Boston Almanack

  A patriot almanac.

  The planting charts carried the argument. You met the war while you looked up the frost.

  Scored90

1776 · Spoken

The widest room. If you could not read, the year still reached you, because someone stood up.

• The tavern

  The post rider came in blowing a horn and left the papers.

  A literate man stood on a chair and read. A thirteen-year-old, too young for the drink, stood at the window. That is how he heard about Boston, and about the Declaration.

  Scored90

• The pulpit

  Sunday.

  The minister told the week as well as the text. For a lot of houses, that was the news.

  Scored90

• The square

  A sheriff, a crier, an officer.

  Orders and the Declaration, read where people already were. Anger was also visual: a straw figure of a royal official or a loyal merchant, paraded and burned. A boy went with the crowd.

  Scored90

1776 · School

What a child was made to know by heart, or to buy for a penny and trade.

• The New England Primer

  The schoolbook. Alphabet rhymes welded to doctrine. "In Adam's Fall / We sinned all."

  Memorized at school or at the morning chore. Nearly every literate child in New England had it by heart. The South put fewer children in that room.

  Scored91

• A Little Pretty Pocket-Book

  John Newbery, London, 1744. Imported and copied. Letters paired with games.

  A gift, in a house that could spare the money. Not the book an apprentice was handed.

  Scored90

• The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes

  1765. An orphan with one shoe. A rich man buys the pair. Work and reading are how she rises.

  Read at night, or by an older child to a younger one. A story about a house you do not have yet.

  Scored90

• Chapbooks

  A penny from a peddler. Jack the Giant-Killer, Tom Thumb, Guy of Warwick. Short, pictured, cut down from longer British tales.

  Bought with a spare coin and traded. This is the shelf children actually passed around. Jack and the Beanstalk, which this desk has scored, is a different story. Do not mix them.

  Scored90

1776 · The book in the house

Read every night, and heard by people who could not read it.

• The King James Bible

  The book most houses had, and often the only one.

  The father read it before bed. Births, marriages, and deaths were written on the blank pages. Enslaved people and neighbors who could not read still heard it quoted.

  Scored100

• The Pilgrim's Progress

  John Bunyan. Christian walks from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City.

  For a child it plays as a journey: a demon, a swamp, a giant. It is still a religious book. Winter nights, read aloud.

  Scored91

• Robinson Crusoe

  1719, already cut down into chapbooks a peddler could sell.

  A shipwreck, work, and a long obedience. A learned house might also have the Odyssey. Most children did not. They had the Primer and a penny story.

  Scored91

1776 · The fire

Told from memory. Paper was expensive. A warning more often than a comfort.

Beauty and the Beast, Red Riding Hood, Jack and the Beanstalk, and Bluebeard are in the average too. That is not a claim that every child knew them.

• Cinderella

  Told, more often than read. In English chapbooks she is The Little Glass Slipper.

  A grandmother, a mother, a hired hand. The fire, because candles were scarce and paper was dear.

  Scored90

• Whittington and His Cat

  A poor boy, a cat, and a fortune made in London.

  The same hearth. A story about leaving and still coming back rich.

  Scored90

• Babes in the Wood

  Orphans left in a forest.

  A warning, not a comfort. Do not wander. Do not trust the stranger. A lot of the night tales were built to frighten a child into staying put.

  Scored90

• The family's own war

  The French and Indian War had ended in 1763. A grandfather in 1776 had been in it.

  No book. The voyage over from England, Germany, or Ireland. Who died. Who held the farm. This was the history a child could not look up.

  Scored90

• Ghosts

  The town's own.

  A hanging ground, a witch story, a light in a swamp. Superstition was ordinary. It was told as fact.

  Scored90

1776 · The street

A penny for the words. You already knew the tune. You sang them with other people.

The Fate of John Burgoyne does not belong here. Saratoga was 1777. Chester's verse about a tyrant's iron rod was printed in 1778. The tune was already sung. Those later words were not.

• Yankee Doodle

  Written to mock a ragged militia. The joke was a feather in the hat.

  Americans kept it. When the British left Boston in March 1776, the band played it at them. Fast enough to march to, with a pot for a drum.

  Scored90

• The Liberty Song

  John Dickinson, 1768. Sung to the British navy tune Heart of Oak.

  "By uniting we stand, by dividing we fall." The chorus a crowd could shout: "In freedom we're born, and in freedom we'll live." Taverns, and the lighting of a liberty pole.

  Scored90

• Chester

  William Billings of Boston. A meeting-house tune already in the air.

  In 1776 a child knew the tune. The verse about a tyrant's iron rod was printed in 1778. Do not put those later words in a 1776 mouth.

  Scored90

• Free America

  Set down to Joseph Warren, killed at Bunker Hill in 1775. To the tune of The British Grenadiers.

  A dead man's song, treated as such. It told a boy the country would outgrow Rome and Britain. That is a large thing to sing at thirteen.

  Scored90