A Cold Night’s Reading

Insanely cold at the moment, edging toward zero Fahrenheit. Just for grins I looked up the temp in Skagway, Alaska, where my friend Ed will be relocating for a time after New Year’s. It was 34 F. there.

Time to get in bed, cover up and read. I’m working my way through Forgotten Americans (Willard Sterne Randall and Nancy Nahra, 1998) a collection of biographical sketches of “footnote” people going all the way back to Anne Hutchinson, a puritan dissident who was kicked out of Massachusetts when it was a theocracy.

Others include Tom Quick, an early Pennsylvanian who made it his life’s work to kill Delaware Indians; William Franklin, bastard son of Benjamin and royal governor of New Jersey; Tecumseh, the Shawnee chief who fought William Henry Harrison and lost; and Charles Finney, an exceptionally popular evangelist of the early republic.

Especially interesting is the story of Benedict Arnold’s wife, Peggy Shippen Arnold, a loyalist who seems to have had a fateful influence on her husband. I’d heard of her, and some of the others, but like many good books, it’s told me much more than I knew before.