Quotes from Nancy Rubin Stuart

Peggy was equally enchanted with the older, more sexually experienced Arnold. Long after their honeymoon and first years of marriage, she continued to praise Arnold as 'the best of husbands.

Raised in an era when women were valued for their sexuality, solicitude , and silence, the eighteen year old stood loyally by Arnold's side.

The soldiers became desperate. 'We were absolutely, literally starved,' noted Private Joseph Martin in his diary. After four days without food, he gnawed a piece of black birch bark off a stick. Then, 'I saw several of the men roast their old shoes and eat them.

American spiritualism, -- a movement that at its peak claimed more than a million followers -- was born out of the basic human longing for contact with a loved one lost to death.

American spiritualism -- a movement that at its peak claimed more than a million followers -- was born out of the basic human longing for contact with a loved one lost to death. but to literalists, spiritualism's true spark came in 1848 from something no more or less powerful than a bored teenage girl.

Swept along by the religious revivalism known as America's Great Awakening, scores of charismatic preachers had descended upon the communities surrounding the Erie Canal to win the souls of its citizens and convert them to a variety of evangelical and radical sects.

If Arnold's leap to the British was to succeed, Peggy must play the innocent as his cheerful and charming young wife.

Pegg, cowering in her bedroom, asked her housekeeper to check on the ailing Varick. Then, willing herself in to a frenzy, she tore at her hair and clothes, weeping, her sobs accelerating in volume.

Exhausted by hours of crying and hysterics, Peggy fell into a restless sleep. Her marathon display of insanity, the grandest theatrical performance of her life, had successfully deceived Washington and Hamilton.

Maggie and Katy found themselves trapped. 'Soon it went so far and so many persons had heard the 'rappings' that we could not confess the wrong without exciting very great anger on the part of the those we had deceived So we went right on," Maggie would explain forty years later.

Andre had violated the international laws of war He had behaved as a common spy. Death by hanging was the usual punishment.

Contradictory emotions roiled over her; grief over Arnold's thwarted plans and their mutual hopes for a large reward; relief that her husband was safe, coupled with doubts abut their marriage. Would she ever see Arnold again?

within a few weeks, the young minister Reverend George York , had expelled the family, accusing them of blasphemy and devil worship. their neighbors suspected the some of them feared the Foxes were in league with the devil, and must have encouraged their daughters to join them by engaging in some kid of 'witchcraft.

B the spring of 1848, the religious climate was still unsettled and ripe for progressive new ideas. America's cities were expanding, its populations swelling with immigrants from Ireland and Europe, its factories and ports booming all of which contributed to a rising mortality rate.

Inevitably, the British barrier ringing Boston created new hardships for residents. While initially forbidden to leave the city, new food shortages sweltering summer temperatures convinced Gage to grant some citizens passes. ...Even after the arrival of fishing boats civilians could not buy the catch until the British were supplied. Outbreaks of disease became common.

Andre mounted the wagon, stood on the coffin, removed his hat, ad lowered his shirt collar. 'It will be but a momentary pang,,' Dr. James Thacher heard him say. Seizing the nose, Andre brought it over his head, tied a knot under his left ear, and placed a handkerchief over his eyes.

By then Mercy, too, had evolved from the decorous wife of an affluent patriot into a reporter for those removed from the theater of war.

to capture those momentous events in print seemed as daunting to Mercy as was the triumph of the Revolution itself.

With the distanced drumbeat of the Revolution, the chink of coins suddenly became more important than commitment to the cause.

Waling the lush grounds overlooking the Potomac, sipping tea, or engaged in needle work in one of Mount Vernon's wainscoted parlors, the two matrons must have made a remarkable contrast; Martha, its soft-spoken mistress, and Lucy, her warm but high-strung 'northern' guest.

Hope Is an Airy Queen.

Nor was the monster public the only one deceived.

What, after all, was the point of describing a Revolution meant to create a democratic republic of free men that was destroyed by power-hungry men determined to create a new 'aristocracy?

According to Swedenborg, all human experience was only a reflection of a larger spiritual one. The human soul was what gave meaning and expression to the concrete world.