This Victorian Life: Modern Adventures in Nineteenth-Century Culture, Cooking, Fashion, and Technology

Part memoir, part micro-history, this is an exploration of the present through the lens of the past--now in paperback!

We all know that the best way to study a foreign language is to go to a country where it's spoken, but can the same immersion method be applied to history? How do interactions with antique objects influence perceptions of the modern world?

From Victorian beauty regimes to nineteenth-century bicycles, custard recipes to taxidermy experiments, oil lamps to an ice box, Sarah a...