• Era: American, late 1850s-early 1860s

In commemoration of the American Thanksgiving holiday, here’s a seasonally appropriate dance from the American Civil War era, a country dance for a set of six couples.

While I have not done a comprehensive search, I appear to have instructions for “Harvest Home” only in a pair of dance manuals by Elias Howe: Howe’s Complete Ballroom Handbook (Boston, 1858) and American Dancing Master and Ball-Room Prompter (Boston, 1862), which include far more country dances than is typical of other dance manuals of the time period.  New England to this day retains a stronger country dance tradition, in the form of modern contra dance, than most other parts of the United States.

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