At the end of the 19th century, after Americans had endured thirty years of tremendous change due to rapid industrial growth, social upheavals, and the excesses of the Gilded Age, they began to look back with increasing fondness to their own past. The Colonial Revival in architecture was one fruit of this nostalgia; another was the insightful chronicles of social history in earlier days written by this author. Following the success of her book Home Life in Colonial Days, she wrote a detailed and fascinating account of American children and their lives from the very earliest settlers to the first decades of the new republic. Covering everything from dress to toys, schools to play, discipline and religion, she described in highly readable prose a child's life in the days before the railroad and telegraph.