Publisher's Synopsis
Adonijah Hill's Journal carries readers back to the year of the United States Centennial, 1876, and brings to life its daily life: its politicians, its criminals, its newspapermen, its fanatic feminists, its scandals, its art, literature, entertainment, music and food. It was a time when the steam engine was the main source of power and the telegraph the major communications technology. Horses pulled local transportation, and newspapers, magazines and books were the only media. Gas lights, coal furnaces and outhouses were the norm. In that year, Philadelphia mounted the Centennial Exhibition in Fairmount Park, a vast world's fair that introduced millions of visitors to new technology, and to photo I.D.s, one-way turnstiles and valet carriage parking. Adonijah and those close to him are fictional, but all others mentioned by name in his journal were real, and the activities and events he describes really happened. As conceived by author James Smart, Adonijah is a 36-year-old Philadelphian, former textile mill worker, Civil War combat veteran, and now a reporter for the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin in the days when newsmen wrote their copy by hand and newspapers were produced without typewriters, telephones and typesetting machines. His journal unfolds true tales of his dramatic Civil War experiences, the story of the Evening Bulletin and its devious founder, his witnessing Dr. Bell's demonstration of a new device called a telephone, his visit to a quiet seaside resort called Atlantic City, and, not least, his sedate Victorian romance with a woman journalist. Adonijah Hill's Journal is time travel to an era when life was much different than our lives, and yet, often surprisingly the same.
