Over the Christmas holidays, a time when one quite often meets people whom one hasn’t seen for a while, I mentioned to two friends that I was working on a book for young people about what life was like before the revolution—a subject on which today’s schools and universities will have taught them little, and that little mostly erroneous. One of these friends said in reply, “What revolution?” The other assumed I was talking about the First American Revolution, the one in the eighteenth century, and was therefore writing about the Colonial period.