Peppermint in America

2020 ◽  
pp. 7-21
Author(s):  
Dan Allosso

This chapter recounts the arrival of peppermint in Connecticut, which was the time Samuel Ranney, the first peppermint king, was growing up in Middletown. It mentions the first appearance of peppermint in colonial America in the early 1760s with advertisements for peppermint essence in the New York Mercury and the New York Gazette in 1763 and 1764. It also talks about advertisements for “Essence of Peppermint” that were appearing in other New York newspapers, three Boston papers, and as far away as Pennsylvania and Georgia by 1770. The chapter explains how peppermint essence was first manufactured in the London suburb of Mitcham, where hybrid peppermint plants were first commercially cultivated around 1750. It also looks at the markets for both English and American peppermint-based medicines that were well established and growing quickly by the last decade of the eighteenth century.

Author(s):  
William E. Nelson

This volume begins where volumes 2 and 3 ended. The main theme of the four-volume project is that the law of America’s thirteen colonies differed profoundly when they first were founded, but had developed into a common American law by the time of the Revolution. This fourth volume focuses on what was common to the law of Britain’s thirteen North American colonies in the mid-eighteenth century, although it also takes important differences into account. The first five chapters examine procedural and substantive law in colonies and conclude that, except in North Carolina and northern New York, the legal system functioned effectively in the interests both of Great Britain and of colonial localities. The next three chapters examine changes in law and the constitution beginning with the Zenger case in 1735—changes that ultimately culminated in independence. These chapters show how lawyers became leading figures in what gradually became a revolutionary movement. It also shows how lawyers used legal and constitutional ideology in the interests, sometimes of an economic character, of their clients. The book thereby engages prior scholarship, especially that of Bernard Bailyn and John Phillip Reid, to show how ideas and constitutional values possessed independent causal significance in leading up to the Revolution but also served to protect institutional structures and socioeconomic interests that likewise possessed causal significance.


Author(s):  
Linford D. Fisher

Although racial lines eventually hardened on both sides, in the opening decades of colonization European and native ideas about differences between themselves and the other were fluid and dynamic, changing on the ground in response to local developments and experiences. Over time, perceived differences were understood to be rooted in more than just environment and culture. In the eighteenth century, bodily differences became the basis for a wider range of deeper, more innate distinctions that, by the nineteenth century, hardened into what we might now understand to be racialized differences in the modern sense. Despite several centuries of dispossession, disease, warfare, and enslavement at the hands of Europeans, native peoples in the Americans almost universally believed the opposite to be true. The more indigenous Americans were exposed to Europeans, the more they believed in the vitality and superiority of their own cultures.


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