The Ideal Place
The Way of Improvement Leads Home: Philip Vickers Fithian and the Rural
Enlightenment in Early America (Early American Studies)
by John Fea
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008
(269 pages, $24.95, paperback)
reviewed by Eric Miller
Feel very home-sick.” Thus whispered Philip Vickers Fithian to his diary on November 21, 1773, three weeks into what his biographer, Messiah College historian John Fea, calls his year-long “Virginia sojourn.” Employed by the planter Robert Carter, Fithian was to provide instruction for seven of Carter’s children and a nephew.
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Eric Miller is an Associate Professor of History at Geneva College in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania (www.geneva.edu). He is writing a biography of Christopher Lasch.
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