Just curious about the 18th century.?

Question

Is there a website that can help me talk and write like people did in the 18th century?

(In America when the country was still young?)

Answer 1

Can you imagine? 200 years from now, someone will find a George Bush speech on dvd, and they'll assume we all talked like that!

Here's a site with 18th century American documents, written of course in the venacular of the day. Hope it helps.

http://www.historicaldocuments.com/18thCentury.htm

Answer 2

No there is no website. What you should do is go and read what people in the eighteenth century were reading, go and read Defoe for example his great novels are Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders or go and read Jane Austen's Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice and other writings. These are English if you want an international flavour there are the writings of the philosophe in France, so Rousseau, Voltaire- try Candide which is fantastic, Helvetius, Diderot- the erotic novel the Nun is wonderful- if you are interested in Germany there are writers like Hammann, Herder and others. If you want to understand the enlightenment try Jonathan Israel's new book Radical Enlightenment, or Isaiah Berlin's studies of the Romantics. If you want voices for American independence then Edmund Burke and Tom Paine are the classics. If you want to read American voices for America then try the amazing Federalist Papers.

But whatever you do get offline and read some stuff- emerse yourself and by the way abandon the sense that you can ever be like these people you can't, too much has happened since, but you can try and understand them.

http://gracchii.blogspot.com

Answer 3

America was actually very old in the 18th century. Maybe if you looked at what the people that had lived for thousands of years in America at that time did (rather than the recent arrivals) your writing would be more accurate.