Further Reading

Written on April 28, 2012 at 7:37 am, by admin

A brief bibliography of some helpful introductions to eighteenth-century Anglo-American literary, political, urban, and art history, and a few primary sources, too.

Bailyn, Bernard. The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson. Cambridge, Mass., 1974.

Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Cambridge, Mass., 1998.

Brewer, John. The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century. New York, 1997.

Bridenbaugh, Carl. Cities in Revolt: Urban Life in America, 1743-1776. New York, 1955.

Carretta, Vincent. Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-made Man. Athens, Georgia, 2005.

Copley, John Singleton. Letters & Papers of John Singleton

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Is Anything in Blindspot True?

Written on April 28, 2012 at 7:35 am, by admin

The Story behind the Story

Blindspot is a twenty-first century novel in eighteenth-century garb. It plays with the conventions of eighteenth-century novels, newspapers, portraits, and histories. It’s dripping with history; in fact, it’s something closer to a mock eighteenth-century novel than to a modern work of historical fiction. This, inevitably, raises questions, especially because we are history professors and, in our historical work, writing and teaching, we’re sticklers for accuracy. Readers often ask us whether anything in Blindspot is true. People asked eighteenth-century novelists this question, too. Their answer? Yes and no. Novels look for a different kind of truth

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Synopsis

Written on April 28, 2012 at 7:33 am, by admin

Written with wit and exuberance by longtime friends and accomplished historians, Blindspot is at once fiction and history, mystery and love story, tragedy and farce. Set in boisterous, rebellious Boston on the eve of the American Revolution, it ingeniously weaves together the fictional stories of a Scottish portrait painter and notorious libertine Stewart Jameson, and Fanny Easton, a fallen woman from one of Boston’s most powerful families who disguises herself as a boy to become Jameson’s defiant and seductive apprentice, Francis Weston.

When Boston’s revolutionary leader, Samuel Bradstreet, dies suddenly on the day Jameson is to paint his portrait, Bradstreet’s

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