The Days and Ways of the Cocked Hats; or, The Dawn of the Revolution

The very best historical fiction is that which takes us into a time and place about which we are not quite so familiar as we would like, and then educates us even while entertaining us.  The events that form the historical edifice of this novel are real—historians formally call them the “1689 Boston revolt.”  Sir Edmund Andros, a central character of the novel, really was the Governor of the Dominion of New England from 1686 until 1689 when, as described herein, the colonists of Boston unceremoniously threw the nasty little vainglorious tyrant into jail.  And he’s not the only central character who actually existed in real life—even the frigate Rose was actually in Boston’s harbor at the time.

Published originally in 1860, The Days and Ways of the Cocked Hats: or, The Dawn of the Revolution, transports the reader back in time to a period when Bostonians still considered themselves patriotic British citizens, but were already chafing at the arrogance, unfairness, and slim benefits of British control.

Preparing old books for digital publication is a labor of love at Travelyn Publishing.  We hold our digital versions of public domain books up against any others with no fear of the comparison.  Our conversion work is meticulous, utilizing a process designed to eliminate errors, maximize reader enjoyment, and recreate as much as possible the atmosphere of the original book even as we are adding the navigation and formatting necessary for a good digital book.  While remaining faithful to a writer’s original words, and the spellings and usages of his era, we are not above correcting obvious mistakes.  If the printer became distracted after placing an ‘a’ at the end of a line and then placed another ‘a’ at the beginning of the next line (they used to do this stuff by hand you know!), what sort of mindless robots would allow that careless error to be preserved for all eternity in the digital version, too?  Not us.  That’s why we have the audacity to claim that our re-publications are often better than the originals.