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Ballykilcline Rising
From Famine Ireland to Immigrant America
Mary Lee Dunn Maguire
University of Massachusetts Press, 2008
In 1847, in the third year of Ireland's Great Famine and the thirteenth year of their rent strike against the Crown, hundreds of tenant farmers in Ballykilcline, County Roscommon, were evicted by the Queen's agents and shipped to New York. Mary Lee Dunn tells their story in this meticulously researched book. Using numerous Irish and U.S. sources and with descendants' help, she traces dozens of the evictees to Rutland, Vermont, as railroads and marble quarries transformed the local economy. She follows the immigrants up to 1870 and learns not only what happened to them but also what light American experience and records cast on their Irish "rebellion."

Dunn begins with Ireland's pre-Famine social and political landscape as context for the Ballykilcline strike. The tenants had rented earlier from the Mahons of Strokestown, whose former property now houses Ireland's Famine Museum. In 1847, landlord Denis Mahon evicted and sent nearly a thousand tenants to Quebec, where half died before or just after reaching the Grosse Ile quarantine station. Mahon was gunned down months later. His murder provoked an international controversy involving the Vatican. An early suspect in the case was a man from Ballykilcline.

In the United States, many of the immigrants resettled in clusters in several locations, including Vermont, Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, and New York. In Vermont they found jobs in the marble quarries, but some of them lost their homes again in quarry labor actions after 1859. Others prospered in their new lives. A number of Ballykilcline families who stopped in Rutland later moved west; one had a son kidnapped by Indians in Minnesota. Readers who have Irish Famine roots will gain a sense of their own "back story" from this account of Ireland and the native Irish, and scholars in the field of immigration studies will find it particularly useful.
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Bernie Sanders and the Boundaries of Reform
Socialism in Burlington
W. J. Conroy
Temple University Press, 2016
Today, Bernie Sanders is a household name, a wildly popular presidential candidate and an icon for progressive Democrats in the United States. But back in the 1980s, this “democratic socialist”—though some folks would prefer the term “social democrat”—was mayor of Burlington, Vermont, where his administration attempted radical reforms. Some efforts were successful, but when a waterfront deal failed, it was not due to Sanders' efforts; he would rather compromise and have a net gain than be an ideological purist.
 
In his preface to this reissue of the 1990 book, Challenging the Boundaries of Reform, W. J. Conroy reflects on the recent legacy of Sanders, his Agenda for America, and his appeal to young voters. His book then looks back to identify Sanders’ experience in Burlington by examining several case studies that unfolded amidst a conservative trend nationally, an unsympathetic state government, and a hostile city council.
 
Ultimately, Conroy asks what lessons can be drawn from the case of Burlington that would aid the American left in its struggle to capture both government and civil society? 
 
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Beyond Adversary Democracy
Jane J. Mansbridge
University of Chicago Press, 1983
"Beyond Adversary Democracy should be read by everyone concerned with democratic theory and practice."—Carol Pateman, Politics

"Sociologists recurrently complain about how seldom it is that we produce books that combine serious theorizing about important issues of public policy with original and sensitive field research. Several rounds of enthusiastic applause, then, are due Jane Mansbridge . . . for having produced a dense and well written book whose subject is nothing less ambitious than the theory of democracy and its problems of equality, solidarity, and consensus. Beyond Adversary Democracy, however, is not simply a work of political theory; Mansbridge explores her abstract subject matter by close studies (using ethnographic, documentary, and questionnaire methods) of two small actual democracies operating at their most elemental American levels (1) a New England town meeting ("Selby," Vermont) and (2) an urban crisis center ("Helpline"), whose 41 employees shared a New Left-Counterculture belief in participatory democracy and consensual decision-making. [Mansbridge] is a force to contend with. It is in our common interest that she be widely read."—Bennett M. Berger, Contemporary Sociology
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Daisy Turner's Kin
An African American Family Saga
Jane C. Beck
University of Illinois Press, 2015
A daughter of freed African American slaves, Daisy Turner became a living repository of history. The family narrative entrusted to her--"a well-polished artifact, an heirloom that had been carefully preserved"--began among the Yoruba in West Africa and continued with her own century and more of life.
 
In 1983, folklorist Jane Beck began a series of interviews with Turner, then one hundred years old and still relating four generations of oral history. Beck uses Turner's storytelling to build the Turner family saga, using at its foundation the oft-repeated touchstone stories at the heart of their experiences: the abduction into slavery of Turner's African ancestors; Daisy's father Alec Turner learning to read; his return as a soldier to his former plantation to kill his former overseer; and Daisy's childhood stand against racism. Other stories re-create enslavement and her father's life in Vermont--in short, the range of life events large and small, transmitted by means so alive as to include voice inflections. Beck, at the same time, weaves in historical research and offers a folklorist's perspective on oral history and the hazards--and uses--of memory.

Publication of this book is supported by grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the L. J. and Mary C. Skaggs Folklore Fund.
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Deluge
Tropical Storm Irene, Vermont’s Flash Floods, and How One Small State Saved Itself
Peggy Shinn
University Press of New England, 2013
On August 28, 2011, after pounding the Caribbean and the U.S. Eastern seaboard for more than a week, Hurricane Irene finally made landfall in New Jersey. As the storm headed into New England, it was quickly downgraded to a tropical storm. And by Sunday afternoon, national news outlets were giving postmortems on the damage. Except for some flooding in low-lying areas, New York City—Irene’s biggest target—had escaped its worst-case scenario. Story over. But the story wasn’t over. As Irene’s eye drifted north, its bands of heavy rains twisted westward over Vermont’s Green Mountains. The mountains forced these bands upward, wringing the rain out of them like water from a sponge. Streams and rivers were transformed into torrents of brown water and debris, gouging mountainsides, reshaping valleys, washing out roads, pulling apart bridges, and carrying away homes, livestock, and automobiles. For weeks, mountain towns were isolated, with no way in or out, and thousands of people were left homeless. In the immediate aftermath of the disaster, it fell on the shoulders of ordinary Vermonters to help victims and rebuild the state. Deluge is the complete story of the floods, the rescue, and the recovery, as seen through the eyes of the people who lived through them: Wilmington’s Lisa Sullivan, whose bookstore was flooded, and town clerk Susie Haughwout, who saved the town records; Tracy Payne, who lost her home in Jamaica—everything in it, and the land on which it sat; Geo Honigford in South Royalton, who lost his crops, but put his own mess on hold to help others in the town; the men who put U.S. Route 4 back together at breakneck speed; and the entire village of Pittsfield, completely isolated after the storm, and its inspirational story of real community.
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From Vermont to Michigan
Wilfred Shaw
University of Michigan Press, 1936

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Going Up the Country
When the Hippies, Dreamers, Freaks, and Radicals Moved to Vermont
Yvonne Daley
University Press of New England, 2018
Going Up the Country is part oral history, part nostalgia-tinged narrative, and part clear-eyed analysis of the multifaceted phenomena collectively referred to as the counterculture movement in Vermont. This is the story of how young migrants, largely from the cities and suburbs of New York and Massachusetts, turned their backs on the establishment of the 1950s and moved to the backwoods of rural Vermont, spawning a revolution in lifestyle, politics, sexuality, and business practices that would have a profound impact on both the state and the nation. The movement brought hippies, back-to-the-landers, political radicals, sexual libertines, and utopians to a previously conservative state and led us to today’s farm to table way of life, environmental consciousness, and progressive politics as championed by Bernie Sanders.
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Inventing Ethan Allen
John J. Duffy and H. Nicholas Muller
University Press of New England, 2014
Since 1969, Ethan Allen has been the subject of three biographical studies, all of which indulge in sustaining and revitalizing the image of Allen as a physically imposing Vermont yeoman, a defender of the rights of Americans, an eloquent military hero, and a master of many guises, from rough frontiersman to gentleman philosopher. Seeking the authentic Ethan Allen, the authors of this volume ask: How did that Ethan Allen secure his place in popular culture? As they observe, this spectacular persona leaves little room for a more accurate assessment of Allen as a self-interested land speculator, rebellious mob leader, inexperienced militia officer, and truth-challenged man who would steer Vermont into the British Empire. Drawing extensively from the correspondence in Ethan Allen and his Kin and a wide range of historical, political, and cultural sources, Duffy and Muller analyze the factors that led to Ethan Allen’s two-hundred-year-old status as the most famous figure in Vermont’s past. Placing facts against myths, the authors reveal how Allen acquired and retained his iconic image, how the much-repeated legends composed after his death coincide with his life, why recollections of him are synonymous with the story of Vermont, and why some Vermonters still assign to Allen their own cherished and idealized values.
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Last Stand of the Red Spruce
Robert A. Mello
Island Press, 1988
Here is a vitally important book for anyone who is concerned with acid rain and the fate of our forests. In his fascinating investigation into the decline of the red spruce on Camel Hump in Vermont, Robert A. Mello explores an ecological mystery. He presents, in clear, concise, non-technical language, both sides of an issue which has split the scientific community.Last Stand of the Red Spruce tells us the the time is long past-due to take action on acid rain. Mello urges pressure for legislation to preserve our health and warns us that we can no longer be complacent.
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Legalizing Gay Marriage
Vermont And The National Debate
Michael Mello, foreword by David Chambers
Temple University Press, 2004
Every day seems to bring news of legal challenges to existing marriage laws and the constitutionality of any form of union for same-sex partners. In this timely and accessible book, Michael Mello argues that the public debates and political battles that have divided Vermont and Massachusetts will be repeated across the country as state after state confronts the issue of legalizing gay marriage.Michael Mello examines recent landmark decisions in state and federal high courts granting civil rights protections to homosexuals. In Vermont, the Supreme Court's recommendation that legislators recognize the "common humanity" that links all individuals irrespective of sexual identity and consider the question of same-sex marriage resulted in the first state legislation to establish civil union. In Massachusetts, the court's ruling that gay marriage is a right protected by the state constitution has plunged the legislature into a contentious debate about a constitutional amendment. In both states, as in California and New York, public discussion of equal civil protections for gays and lesbians soon become mired in contending views of morality, religion, social mores, and the sanctity of heterosexual marriage.Mello regards the widespread and virulent opposition to any form of same-sex unions as proof that in Vermont, as elsewhere, homosexuals are indeed a "despised minority" in need of the law's protection. Thus, civil union laws represent only a partial victory because they create a separate and inherently unequal category of relationships for gay people. Mello's analysis of the issues provides an invaluable guide to the battles being waged in state legislatures and by politicians at the national level.
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Marie Blythe
Howard Frank Mosher
University Press of New England, 2012
Howard Frank Mosher is one of the best-loved writers of northern New England, one who has “created a literary landscape as textured as anything produced by the U. S. Geological Survey,” according to USA Today. His “greatest gift,” says the Washington Post, is “his talent for creating lively, living characters.” One of his most vivid and memorable characters is Marie Blythe. At the dawn of the twentieth century, a young girl with a felicitous name immigrates to Vermont from French Canada. She grows up confronting the grim realities of life with an indomitable spirit—nursing victims of a tuberculosis epidemic, enduring a miscarriage alone in the wilderness, and coping with the uncertainties of love. In Marie Blythe, Mosher has created a strong-minded, passionate, and truly memorable heroine.
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A Matter of Life and Death
Hunting in Contemporary Vermont
Marc Boglioli
University of Massachusetts Press, 2009
American hunters occupy a remarkably complex place in this country's cultural and political landscape. On the one hand, they are cast as perpetrators of an anachronistic and unnecessary assault on innocent wildlife. On the other hand, they are lauded as exemplars of no-nonsense American rugged individualism. Yet despite the passion that surrounds the subject, we rarely hear the unfiltered voices of actual hunters in discussions of hunting.

In A Matter of Life and Death, anthropologist Marc Boglioli puts a human face on a group widely regarded as morally suspect, one that currently stands in the crossfire of America's so-called culture wars. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Addison County, Vermont, which took him from hunting camps and sporting goods stores to local bars and kitchen tables, Boglioli focuses on how contemporary hunters, women as well as men, understand their relationship to their prey. He shows how hunters' attitudes toward animals flow directly from the rural lifeways they have continued to maintain in the face of encroaching urban sensibilities. The result is a rare glimpse into a culture that experiences wild animals in a way that is at once violent, consumptive, and respectful, and that regards hunting as an enduring link to a vanishing past. It is a book that will challenge readers—hunters, non-hunters, and anti-hunters alike—to reconsider what constitutes a morally appropriate relationship with the non-human residents of this planet.
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No Place But Here
A Teacher’s Vocation in a Rural Community
Garret Keizer
University Press of New England, 1996
Weaving anecdotal narrative with trenchant reflections on his profession, Garret Keizer offers one teacher's answer to the hue and cry over the crisis in education. An English teacher in rural Vermont, he writes of the opposing realities he faces every day: the promise and energy of the young and the oppressive effect of their economic disadvantages; the beauty of the countryside and its people and the harsh, sometimes ugly edge of life there; the need for discipline and the importance of rebellion. In exploring the demands peculiar to his own community, Keizer movingly depicts the difficulties-some triumphantly overcome, some overwhelming-that form the heart of teaching anywhere.
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North Country Captives
Selected Narratives of Indian Captivity from Vermont and New Hampshire
Edited by Colin G. Calloway
University Press of New England, 1992
Revealing firsthand narratives of Indian captivity from eighteenth-century New Hampshire and Vermont. Narratives of Europeans who experienced Indian captivity represent one of the oldest genres of American literature. They are often credited with establishing the stereotype of Indians as cruel and bloodthirsty. While early southern New England accounts were heavily influenced by a dominant Puritan interpretation which had little room for individual and cultural distinctions, later northern New England narratives show growing independence from this influence. The eight narratives selected for this book challenge old stereotypes and provide a clearer understanding of the nature of captive taking. Indians used captives to replace losses in their tribes and families, and also to participate in the French and British ransom market. These stories portray Indian captors as individuals with a unique culture and offer glimpses of daily life in frontier communities. Calloway complements them with valuable historical background material. His book will appeal especially to readers interested in Native American peoples and life on the north country frontier of Vermont and New Hampshire.
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Playing God in the Meadow
How I Learned to Admire My Weeds
Martha Leb Molnar
University of Massachusetts Press, 2022

After decades of fantasizing and saving, of working multiple jobs and embracing frugality in the midst of Manhattan, Martha Leb Molnar and her husband had found their parcel of land. Determined to turn an overgrown and unproductive Vermont apple orchard into a thriving and beautiful landscape, they decided to restore this patch of land to a pristine meadow and build a safe haven for their family and nearby wildlife.

Once they cleared the gnarled and dying trees away, Molnar was forced to wage war on the invasive species that had sprung up around the property. Propelled by the heated debates surrounding non-native species and her own complicated family history and migration, she was driven to research the Vermont landscape, turning to scientific literature, experts in botany and environmental science, and locals who have long tended the land in search of answers. At turns funny, thoughtful, and conversational, Playing God in the Meadow follows this big city transplant as she learns to make peace with rural life and an evolving landscape that she cannot entirely control.

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Reading the Mountains of Home
John Elder
Harvard University Press, 1998

Small farms once occupied the heights that John Elder calls home, but now only a few cellar holes and tumbled stone walls remain among the dense stands of maple, beech, and hemlocks on these Vermont hills. Reading the Mountains of Homeis a journey into these verdant reaches where in the last century humans tried their hand and where bear and moose now find shelter. As John Elder is our guide, so Robert Frost is Elder's companion, his great poem "Directive" seeing us through a landscape in which nature and literature, loss and recovery, are inextricably joined.

Over the course of a year, Elder takes us on his hikes through the forested uplands between South Mountain and North Mountain, reflecting on the forces of nature, from the descent of the glaciers to the rush of the New Haven River, that shaped a plateau for his village of Bristol; and on the human will that denuded and farmed and abandoned the mountains so many years ago. His forays wind through the flinty relics of nineteenth-century homesteads and Abenaki settlements, leading to meditations on both human failure and the possibility for deeper communion with the land and others.

An exploration of the body and soul of a place, an interpretive map of its natural and literary life, Reading the Mountains of Home strikes a moving balance between the pressures of civilization and the attraction of wilderness. It is a beautiful work of nature writing in which human nature finds its place, where the reader is invited to follow the last line of Frost's "Directive," to "Drink and be whole again beyond confusion."

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Roxana's Children
The Biography of a Nineteenth-Century Vermont Family
Lynn A. Bonfield
University of Massachusetts Press, 1995
Roxana's Children is a well-researched and well written biography of Roxana Brown Walbridge Watts (1802-62) and her descendants. The book is constructed from the descendants' 300 preserved letters, 30 diaries, and photographs from the family's village life during 19th-century Vermont. Bonfield and Morrison use these sources to discuss social change and movement in American life.
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Rural Environmental Planning for Sustainable Communities
Frederic O. Sargent, Paul Lusk, Jose Rivera, and Maria Varela
Island Press, 1991

Rural Environmental Planning for Sustainable Communities offers an explanation of the concept of Rural Environmental Planning (REP) along with case studies that show how to apply REP to specific issues such as preserving agricultural lands, planning river and lake basins, and preserving historical sites.

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Senator Leahy
A Life in Scenes
Philip Baruth
University Press of New England, 2017
Having vaulted to a position in the United States Senate at the tender age of thirty-four, Patrick Leahy now claims the longest tenure of any member of that institution still serving—and he was third in line for the presidency when the Democrats held control. Few recent American lawmakers have watched history unfold so at such close range; fewer still have influenced it so powerfully. Philip Baruth brings a thriller-like intensity to the most spectacular of those scenes: the 9/11 attack on the US capital, the contentious drafting of the Patriot Act, the ensuing anthrax attacks, and the dramatic 2014 opening of diplomatic ties with Cuba. Throughout, the biography focuses in on Leahy’s meticulous image making, his cultivation of a “Top Cop” persona both in the media and at the ballot box. It is an approach that culminates in simultaneous roles for the lawmaker as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and as the tough-talking “distinguished gentleman” in Christopher Nolan’s acclaimed Dark Knight trilogy of Batman films. Leahy’s improbable success, Philip Baruth argues, in the end lies in his ability both to be and to play the top cop not only in post-Watergate Vermont, but in a post-9/11 America viciously divided between the red states and the blue.
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States at War, Volume 1
A Reference Guide for Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont in the Civil War
Edited by Richard F. Miller
University Press of New England, 2013
While many Civil War reference books exist, there is no single compendium that contains important details about the combatant states (and territories) that Civil War researchers can readily access for their work. People looking for information about the organization, activities, economies, demographics, and prominent personalities of Civil War states and state governments must assemble data from a variety of sources, and many key sources remain unavailable online. This volume, the first of six, provides a crucial reference book for Civil War scholars and historians, professional or amateur, seeking information about individual states or groups of states. Its principal sources include the Official Records, state adjutant-general reports, legislative journals, state and federal legislation, federal and state executive speeches and proclamations, and the general and special orders issued by the military authorities of both governments. Designed and organized for easy use, this book can be read in two ways: by individual state, with each chapter offering a stand-alone skeletal history of an individual state’s war years, or across states, comparing reactions to the same event or solutions to the same problems.
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The Story of Vermont
A Natural and Cultural History, Second Edition
Christopher McGrory Klyza and Stephen C. Trombulak
University Press of New England, 2015
In this second edition of their classic text, Klyza and Trombulak use the lens of interconnectedness to examine the geological, ecological, and cultural forces that came together to produce contemporary Vermont. They assess the changing landscape and its inhabitants from its pre-human evolution up to the present, with special focus on forests, open terrestrial habitats, and the aquatic environment. This edition features a new chapter covering from 1995 to 2013 and a thoroughly revised chapter on the futures of Vermont, which include discussions of Tropical Storm Irene, climate change, eco-regional planning, and the resurgence of interest in local food and energy production. Integrating key themes of ecological change into a historical narrative, this book imparts specific information about Vermont, speculates on its future, and fosters an appreciation of the complex synergy of forces that shaped this region. This volume will interest scholars, students, and Vermonters intrigued by the state’s long-term natural and human history.
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Timber Rattlesnakes in Vermont & New York
Biology, History, and the Fate of an Endangered Species
Jon Furman
University Press of New England, 2007
Today, small populations of timber rattlesnakes (Crotalus horridus) quietly inhabit parts of Rutland County in Vermont, and Warren, Washington, and Essex counties in New York. Because the species is endangered, the exact locations of established dens in this area are a closely guarded secret. Insider, naturalist, and author Jon Furman has devoted years to the study of the snake’s past and present range, its habitat and biology, the period in Vermont and upstate New York history during which timber rattlesnakes were ruthlessly hunted for a bounty, and the outlook for this severely threatened species in both states. Soundly anchored in the latest scientific data, Furman proffers an accessible and engaging account of contemporary fieldwork and first-person interviews with herpetologists and old-time bounty hunters. For expert and lay readers interested in snakes and reptiles, northeastern fauna and natural history, conservation, and endangered species, this volume clearly explicates the timber rattlesnake’s biology as well as what happens and what to do when one bites. It also explores the troubling decline of the northeastern population caused by bounty hunting between the 1890s and the early 1970s, other past and present threats to the species’ survival, and what measures are being taken—and additional ones that must be taken—to ensure that timber rattlesnakes survive and thrive in the northeast. Historical and contemporary illustrations bring these reptiles and their world to life. Timber Rattlesnakes in Vermont & New York shines a new light on a maligned and misunderstood species.
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Trail Running Southern Vermont
Ben Kimball
University of Massachusetts Press, 2024

The wild and rural landscape of southern Vermont offers a true bounty of great trail-running opportunities, from out­-and-­back (or point­to­point) runs on popular long-distance routes, such as segments of the Long Trail or Appalachian Trail, to quiet, little-known loops hidden away in the woods. This helpful guide is just the resource needed for trip planning or for a spontaneous run in a beautiful place.

Local expert trail runner Ben Kimball offers a range of suggested route options, sometimes even several at the same site, for runners of all skill levels. He also provides important practical information, such as the full distance of the suggested route; a difficulty rating; the trail style and type; the total ascent; and directions, along with a detailed description of the trail itself. There are also scannable codes for downloading trail maps to your smartphone. The trails included vary in difficulty and terrain type, and range from low elevations in the Connecticut River Valley to as high as 4,000 feet at Killington Peak in the Green Mountains. This indispensable book is the perfect companion for adventurous runners and hikers interested in exploring southern Vermont.

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Two Vermonts
Geography and Identity, 1865-1910
Paul Searls
University of New Hampshire Press, 2006
Two Vermonts establishes a little-known fact about Vermont: that the state's fascination with tourism as a savior for a suffering economy is more than a century old, and that this interest in tourism has always been dogged by controversy. Through this lens, the book is poised to take its place as the standard work on Vermont in the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era. Searls examines the origins of Vermont's contemporary identity and some reasons why that identity ("Who is a Vermonter?") is to this day so hotly contested.

Searls divides nineteenth-century Vermonters into conceptually "uphill," or rural/parochial, and "downhill," or urban/cosmopolitan, elements. These two groups, he says, negotiated modernity in distinct and contrary ways. The dissonance between their opposing tactical approaches to progress and change belied the pastoral ideal that contemporary urban Americans had come to associate with the romantic notion of "Vermont." Downhill Vermonters, espousing a vision of a mutually reinforcing relationship between tradition and progress, unilaterally endeavored to foster the pastoral ideal as a means of stimulating economic development. The hostile uphill resistance to this strategy engendered intense social conflict over issues including education, religion, and prohibition in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The story of Vermont's vigorous nineteenth-century quest for a unified identity bears witness to the stirring and convoluted forging of today's "Vermont."

Searls's engaging exploration of this period of Vermont's history advances our understanding of the political, economic, and cultural transformation of all of rural America as industrial capitalism and modernity revolutionized the United States between 1865 and 1910. By the late Progressive Era, Vermont's reputation was rooted in the national yearning to keep society civil, personal, and meaningful in a world growing more informal, bureaucratic, and difficult to navigate. The fundamental ideological differences among Vermont communities are indicative of how elusive and frustrating efforts to balance progress and tradition were in the context of effectively negotiating capitalist transformation in contemporary America.
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Understood Betsy
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
Brandeis University Press, 1999
Thanks to her loving but over-protective guardian aunts, Betsy is a fearful, self-absorbed, nine-year-old hypochondriac. One of the most terrible items on her long list of fears is the horrid cousins her aunts never mention without shuddering. When her aunts are suddenly no longer able to care for her, Betsy is, incredibly, sent to live with those very relatives. Arriving in Vermont alone and full of trepidation, Betsy is immediately invited by her Uncle Henry to drive the carriage. Steering the fearful horses is just the beginning of her adventures in New England -- and independence. By the novel's end, Betsy has become very fond of the rough but affectionate relatives who eat in the kitchen and expect her to wash her own dishes. When she gets a letter from the aunts inviting her to come home, Betsy must make a difficult choice. Understood Betsy has been published in numerous editions worldwide since its 1917 debut, and continues to charm readers with its delightful and surprisingly liberated characters.
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Where the Rivers Flow North
Howard Frank Mosher
University Press of New England, 2004
The stories of Where the Rivers Flow North are “superior work, rich in texture and character,” says the Wall Street Journal; “the novella is brilliantly done.” That novella, the title story of the collection, was also made into a feature film starring Rip Torn and Michael J. Fox. These six stories, available again in this new edition, continue Mosher’s career-long exploration of Kingdom County, Vermont. “Within the borders of his fictional kingdom,” the Providence Journal has noted, “Mosher has created mountains and rivers, timber forests and crossroads villages, history and language. And he has peopled the landscape with some of the truest, most memorable characters in contemporary literature.”
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