Adonijah Hill's Journal

Meet Adonijah Hill, a thirty-six-year-old Philadelphian, former textile mill worker, Civil War combat veteran, and reporter for the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin in the Centennial year, 1876. Adonijah never existed, but his daily journal, imagined by Philadelphia writer James Smart, takes readers back to a time before automobiles, airplanes, telephones, radio, television, computers, skyscrapers, and dozens of things we take for granted today. Steam engines and the telegraph were the major technologies, gas lights and horse-drawn vehicles were the norm, dynamite was the dreaded weapon of mass destruction. A typical work week was sixty hours.

Adonijah and those close to him are fictional, but all others mentioned by name in his journal were real, and the activities and events he describes really happened. His daily observations on such topics as politics, the military, journalism, music, and the great Centennial Exhibition in Fairmount Park reveal to modern readers how much of the past was different than our lives, and how much was surprisingly the same.