This article explores the praxis of transatlantic snuff- and tobacco-taking and its importance to personal and national identity-making over the long eighteenth century. It focuses in particular on the role of snuff- and tobacco boxes, which uniquely provided white middling-sorts on both sides of the Atlantic with a socialized canvas upon which significant statements of status, personality, and sensibility could be made. However, a closer study of these objects during America's revolutionary period reveals stark contrasts in the social, political, and gendered meanings ascribed to tobacco-taking between Britain and America. The material evidence, it is argued, suggests that for men, and especially for women in revolutionary America, snuff- and tobacco-taking became almost synonymous with loyalty to the republic.

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F or the governors of early modern England, an awareness of "how the people stood affected to the present State" was necessarily an issue of constant concern. That affection was judged in relation to a Christian Humanist concept of love, which combined the virtuous, physical, and reciprocal passions of caritas, eros, and anteros. 1 Indeed, love was explicitly and consistently reiterated as being fundamental to the bonding of the disparate and largely volunteer-governed state. Conceptualizing the bonds of loyalty in this way entailed upon both governors and governed a communitarian idea of citizenship. 2 It was, however, religiously exclusive. While Protestants (preferably Anglicans) had a monopoly on the virtue of love, other religious and national groups, especially papists, Jews, and Turks, were seen as necessarily motivated by the vicious passions of lust and envy and could neither be loyal nor deserving of loyalty. 3 As philosopher R. E. Ewin argued, loyalty is not itself a virtue: it is a vehicle through which virtues, such as love, can operate and by which the benefits of virtue-for example, feelings of joy or satisfaction-can accrue. 4 Angela McShane (formerly McShane-Jones) is Tutor in Graduate Studies (post-1600) for the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A)/

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Live music was part of everyday life for people in early modern England. 1 It could be experienced in religious and secular places in many different forms, such as organ music and psalm singing in church; professional and amateur performances in taverns, alehouses, music-houses and theatres; musical calls of tradesmen and hawkers in the street; dance tunes played on bagpipe and fiddle at fairs and weddings; the humming of milk-maids or shoemakers at work; stirring martial music accompanying marching soldiers or recruiting parties. It could even be unavoidable 'musak'. For example, Coventry paid their city-waits £2 to £3 'to play on their instruments of music at two of the clock till break of day', 'through the whole city every morning from Michaelmas to 22 April yearly'. 2 London bellmen who were employed to act as night-watchmen, were not only expected to ring their bell and sing their verses out on the street, but also beneath the windows of prisons where those who were condemned to die the next day were lodged. 3 This dismal noise proved too much for two passers-by in 1687; they were accused of murdering bellman Peter Penrose for making such a racket. 4 Ballad singers and sellers were also unquestionably important contributors to the urban and rural soundscape in seventeenth-century England. Various records show them operating in urban and rural contexts right across the country. 5 Increasingly, as the century wore on, ballad singers and sellers 1 See Christopher Marsh, Music and Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press