18th Century

Yorktown, Va., observes its 300-year history next weekend with a three-day celebration from Friday to Sunday. The whole town will be involved, and visitors can enjoy free activities from the opening ceremony and youth concert on Friday night to the closing ceremony and the lighting of 300 candles on Sunday evening, and including parades, living history re-enactments, demonstrations, concerts, sports and other events. The festival will be held in the historic district, along the waterfront and on Main Street from the Colonial National Historical Park Visitor Center to the Yorktown Victory Center.

After a busy spring of plowing and planting, the farm family at Claude Moore Colonial Farm at Turkey Run in McLean, Va., is ready for its 18th-Century Market Fair Saturday and July 17, weather permitting.Three times a year this working, lower-class farm of the Colonial period stages a market fair, where all wares, food and activities are authentic to the 18th century. As if in another time zone, visitors will find stalls that sell fresh vegetables and fruits that were grown in the 18th century, a milliner, a chandler (candle maker)

Christmas in Colonial Williamsburg evokes images of holidays past and Dickens remembered, of warbling carolers, flaming yule logs, brimming wassail bowls, cobblestone streets and doors trimmed with evergreens.The setting is perfect. Colonial Williamsburg lives today just as it did nearly three centuries ago, when it was the social, cultural and political capital of England's largest and perhaps most influential colony in the New World. Later it became the only important Colonial capital that, for practical matters, could be restored to its pre-Revolutionary appearance.

Two West Virginia forts turn back the clock to show how the early pioneers celebrated Christmas. The annual Christmas Festival at Fort Salem near Clarksburg depicts an Appalachian frontier holiday this weekend and again Saturday and next Sunday from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. The candle-laden tree is lit each evening and costumed minstrels play music of the period on lutes and mandolins. Craftspeople perform traditional craft skills and period refreshments are served. Call (304) 782-5245.Prickett's Fort near Fairmont was built in 1774 and served at one time as a trading post for trappers, hunters and farmers.

There are more than the usual number of events around the region next weekend, so get out your traveling shoes.Family Day next Sunday is one of the big events of the year at the Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington, Del. The setting is the original du Pont mills, estate and gardens. The entire complex will be open to visitors and activities are geared to life in the 19th century. There will be a Civil War encampment by the 61st New York Volunteer Infantry Mifflin Guard, whose members will participate that afternoon in a 19th century baseball game (played by the 1845 rules of the Knickerbocker Baseball Club)

Not every artist performs his own musical accompaniment.But a weekend exhibit of the prints of Randy Miller will also feature the fiddling of Randy Miller.His art and music will be on hand during the Ellicott City Millfest from 7 p.m. to midnight today and 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. tomorrow at the Margaret Smith Gallery."It fits with the Millfest," said Ms. Smith. "It's an old heritage festival and he's popular. It's a good mix. He puts in rural, old American folk art."A self-taught artisan and musician, Mr. Miller has spent years mastering the antique, yet compatible, art forms -- wood engraving and New England fiddle music.

The children were running and jumping all across the village green in Williamsburg, Va., trying out stilts and rolling wooden hoops.Some had just gotten out of "school" -- held under a tree behind a house. Dutifully, they had scratched the answers to math problems on slate boards and answered questions about the story the teacher had read from the tiny book.Others were drilling with the Army militia, marching down to the encampment, following the tough sergeant's orders, standing by as the cannon was fired.

Give me that old-time religion of romance and daring, of heroism and sacrifice, of love and honor. Give me that old-time religion of a powerful story well-told, with a hero to admire and a villain to hate. And, while you're at it, let the two go man-on-man in the last minutes, each bearing three feet of cold steel.Give me, in short, "Rob Roy," the best film to hit town in many a month, the most old-fashioned film to hit town in many a year, and a film that's flat out terrific. Raids. Sword fights.

"Slammerkin," by Emma Donoghue. Harcourt. 336 pages. $24. She did it for a ribbon. In 1761, Mary Saunders, the teen-aged daughter of a London seamstress, threw away her respectable life to become a whore and for what? A ribbon. Granted, Mary didn't have much: a heap of rags for her bed, a few crusts for her dinner. As for clothes, Mary had only her charity school smock, while the harlots at the Seven Dials wore "yellow like fresh butter, ink black, and the blue of fire." One of them even had a strawberry skirt, "all swollen up as with air; her breasts spilled over the top like milk foaming in a pan. Her piled-high hair was powdered silver, and the red ribbon ran through it like a streak of blood."

Traditional design will meet contemporary flair this fall at the Designer Show House, the newly restored Bodley-Randall House, originally built in 1715. The house, hidden within a courtyard between College Avenue and State Circle, will be on display from Sept. 28 to Oct. 28.The Auxiliary of Anne Arundel Medical Center will coordinate the sixth designer show, with all proceeds going to Medical Center projects. Professional interior designers from Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Annapolis and the Eastern Shore will interpret the preserved and restored home, which is still used as a residence after 285 years.