Nicholas Biddle in Greece: The Journals and Letters of 1806

by R.A. McNeal

Book Overview

Nicholas Biddle (1786-1844) was a noted politician and financier in early nineteenth-century America. At eighteen, he went to Europe as the secretary of the American minister to France. He also made the acquaintance of James Monroe when Monroe was the American ambassador to London. He was later elected to the state legislature and senate of Pennsylvania. Ultimately he became a director and then the president of the Bank of the United States. In the...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0271009144
• ISBN13: 9780271009148
• Release Date: December 1993
• Publisher: Penn State University Press
• Length: 252 Pages
• Weight: 0.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Travel the way it used to be

This book was one of the hundreds lining the walls of the apartment we stayed in in Athens during a recent trip to Greece. If the owner hadn't mentioned it to us I wouldn't have noticed it. Nicholas Biddle travelled through Greece for two months in 1806. His experiences were very different to ours - the country was still ruled by the Ottomans, many of the ancient sites were either buried under silt or covered with contemporary buildings and he got around on horses. He took almost as long getting to and from Greece from Italy as he spent in Greece itself - including two weeks quarantine on his return. His journey had some similarities though to ours thought - he visited a lot of the sites we did (in fact he saw more) and he kept the 19th century version of a blog - a journal which he posted home to his family! The journal only recently came to light and the introduction is almost as informative as the journals and letters themselves.