Bring Documents to your Reenactments!

Today Americans boast a whoppingly deplorable literacy rate of about 86% depending on how you measure literacy.  Compare this to Colonial New England where, discounting slaves, women, indentured servants, and indians, in a time when books, newpapers, and magazines were largely unobtainable, the literacy rate was almost 60%*.  Today with telephones, television, radio, and various …

Unfiltered Beer is Good for You!

For thousands of years beer served as food and medicine; it had antiseptic, anti-bacterial and anti-viral properties.  The health benefits of beer not only come from the grains and yeast but also the hops. Hops contain a flavonoid called xanthohumol that strongly suppresses CYP1A2 (suppressing is good), a liver enzyme that metabolizes various environmental procarcinogens …

Could one of our Founding Fathers have been a Jew?

While writing the blog on Chanukah in Colonial America, I came across some lectures and articles by Andrew Porwancher, a professor at the University of Oklahoma, who has an interesting hypothesis.  It seems that while researching the early life of Alexander Hamilton, Porwancher uncovered some interesting facts. Alexander Hamilton is the son of Rachel Faucette …