Instead of the 250th anniversary of an event from the American Revolution in Boston, we’re rewinding the clock 392 years to the spring of 1633, when the first Governor of the Massachusetts Bay colony was given the first fork in America. We’re going to explore why forks were unknown in Boston at that time, and indeed why they were unfamiliar in England until just a few years before. We’ll talk about why it took Boston over 100 years to fully embrace the idea of eating food with a fork, including changes to 17th century table manners and the belief that the fork was an inherently sinful utensil.

Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/328/

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John Winthrop and the First Fork in America

• Alice Morse Earl, Customs and Fashions in Old New England


• John Henry Buck, Old Plate, Its Makers & Marks


• John F. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America


• George Francis Dow, Every Day Life in the Massachusetts Bay Colony


• A fork made in Boston around the beginning of the 18th century


• James Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten


• Lydia Barrett Blackmore, “Just IMPORTED and to be SOLD”: Methods of Acquisition and Use of Knives, Forks, and Silver Spoons in Eighteenth-Century Use of Knives, Forks, and Silver Spoons in Eighteenth-Century Virginia


• Andrew McFarland Davis, John Harvard’s Life in America, or Social and Political Life in New England in 1637–1638


• Samuel Sewall’s diary


• Laura Diaz-Arnesto, Byzantine Women – The Princess Theophano and Introducing the fork into Europe


• Thomas Coryat, Coryat’s Crudities


• J. H. B. “Knives and Forks.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, vol. 2, no. 9, 1907


• Jeffrey Burton Russell, The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity


• Edward Howes to John Winthrop, Jr


• Public domain header photo via The Met


• The Regicides in Boston