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With an original 1931 press run of only seven hundred and fifty, surviving copies of Land Ho! 1620 are now either in archives or exist as valued collector's editions. Acclaimed by the Cape Cod Pilgrim Memorial Association in 1957 as "the most authentic, interesting, and best written book on the voyage of the Pilgrims and their lives," Nickerson's work is now available in this handsome paperback edition, complete with all original illustrations and maps. Nickerson scholar Delores Bird Carpenter updated all one hundred and seventy- nine annotations, checking them against original sources. In addition, she has prepared a new bibliography and an extensive, new introduction that places Land Ho! 1620 into its historical and historiographical context.  
     Divided into four parts, the first describes "the Voyage"; the second, told with the skill of a shipbuilder, describes "the Ship," which includes drawings of the deck plan, the passenger quarters, and the elevation and the sail plan. Also included in this section are discussions of the ship's speed, instruments, and personnel. The Third, "the backside of Cape Cod," addresses the problem of where the Mayflower first saw land, and its subsequent course. Nickerson concludes with "the Landfall and the Landing." Of great significance is his map, The Back Side of Cape Cod Today—1930 and Yesterday—1620.

Through an in-depth study of the Latino community in Boston, Carol hardy-Fanta addressees three key debates in American politics: how to look at the ways in which women and men envision the meaning of politics and political participation; how to understand culture and the political life of expanding immigrant populations; and how to create a more participatory America. The author's interviews with Latinos from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Central and South America and her participation in community events in North Dorchester, Jamaica Plain, and the South End document the often ignored contribution of Latina women as candidates, political mobilizers, and community organizers. Hardy-Fanta examines critical gender differences in how politics is defined, what strategies Latina women and Latino men use to generate political participation, and how culture and gender interact in the political empowerment of the ethic communities.

Hardy-Fanta challenges the notion of political apathy among Latinos and presents factors that stimulate political participation. She finds that the vision of politics promoted by Latina women—one based on connectedness, collectivity, community, and consiousness-raising—contrasts sharply with a male political concern for status, hierarchy, and personal opportunity.

For over twenty years, John Hanson Mitchell has visited Beaver Brook almost daily. This small, slow-flowing Massachusetts stream was of vital importance for early settlers and an indispensable resource for the Native peoples who lived and fished along its shores, but it has been largely forgotten in our own time. Revisiting the river's oxbows, bends, and marshes over the course of a year, Legends of the Common Stream combines a natural history of Beaver Brook with a study of the people who lived on this land and a meandering, but stunning, examination of the myths and legends that can help us to better understand humanity's relationship to the natural world.

While Mitchell never leaves the brook's shores, he draws from a range of traditions and takes readers on excursions to regions and cultures across the globe and across time, making the case that our contemporary separation from nature goes hand in hand with our alienation from the world of myth. This book seeks to restore these broken relationships and offers the reminder that while cultures may come and go, the stream goes on forever.

Karin Aguilar-San Juan examines the contradictions of Vietnamese American community and identity in two emblematic yet different locales: Little Saigon in suburban Orange County, California (widely described as the capital of Vietnamese America) and the urban "Vietnamese town" of Fields Corner in Boston, Massachusetts. Their distinctive qualities challenge assumptions about identity and space, growth amid globalization, and processes of Americanization.

With a comparative and race-cognizant approach, Aguilar-San Juan shows how places like Little Saigon and Fields Corner are sites for the simultaneous preservation and redefinition of Vietnamese identity. Intervening in debates about race, ethnicity, multiculturalism, and suburbanization as a form of assimilation, this work elaborates on the significance of place as an integral element of community building and its role in defining Vietnamese American-ness.

Staying Vietnamese, according to Aguilar-San Juan, is not about replicating life in Viet Nam. Rather, it involves moving toward a state of equilibrium that, though always in flux, allows refugees, immigrants, and their U.S.-born offspring to recalibrate their sense of self in order to become Vietnamese anew in places far from their presumed geographic home.

Scholars have made urban mothers living in poverty a focus of their research for decades. These women’s lives can be difficult as they go about searching for housing and decent jobs and struggling to care for their children while surviving on welfare or working at low-wage service jobs and sometimes facing physical or mental health problems. But until now little attention has been paid to an important force in these women’s lives: religion.

 

Based on in-depth interviews with women and pastors, Susan Crawford Sullivan presents poor mothers’ often overlooked views. Recruited from a variety of social service programs, most of the women do not attend religious services, due to logistical challenges or because they feel stigmatized and unwanted at church. Yet, she discovers, religious faith often plays a strong role in their lives as they contend with and try to make sense of the challenges they face. Supportive religious congregations prove important for women who are involved, she finds, but understanding everyday religion entails exploring beyond formal religious organizations.

 

Offering a sophisticated analysis of how faith both motivates and at times constrains poor mothers’ actions, Living Faith reveals the ways it serves as a lens through which many view and interpret their worlds.

Winner of the 2023 Society for History in the Federal Government Book Prize

Boston National Historical Park is one of America's most popular heritage destinations, drawing in millions of visitors annually. Tourists flock there to see the site of the Boston Massacre, to relive Paul Revere's midnight ride, and to board Old Ironsides—all of these bound together by the iconic Freedom Trail, which traces the city's revolutionary saga.

Making sense of the Revolution, however, was never the primary aim for the planners who reimagined Boston's heritage landscape after the Second World War. Seth C. Bruggeman demonstrates that the Freedom Trail was always largely a tourist gimmick, devised to lure affluent white Americans into downtown revival schemes, its success hinging on a narrow vision of the city's history run through with old stories about heroic white men. When Congress pressured the National Park Service to create this historical park for the nation's bicentennial celebration in 1976, these ideas seeped into its organizational logic, precluding the possibility that history might prevail over gentrification and profit.

This book examines a remarkable collection of twenty-seven letters written by a white working-class woman to her African American lover in 1907 and 1908. Stuffed inside a black lace stocking, the letters were hidden under the floorboards of a house in Northampton, Massachusetts, until their recent discovery. Reflecting the passions and anxieties of the moment, the letters were written by Alice Hanley, the daughter of Irish Catholic immigrants, to Channing Lewis, a cook in Springfield. Since the thoughts and feelings of women like Hanley have usually been filtered through middle-class reformers, her words provide a rare window into a realm of American social life seldom explored by historians. The letters are accompanied by essays that skillfully probe their larger meanings. Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz introduces the letters, placing them in the context of their time, while journalist Phoebe Rolin Mitchell recounts the story of their discovery. Kathy Peiss explores Hanley's life, her negotiation of illicit love, and her desire for respectability, re-creating a dense and textured world of home, church, and town. Historian Louis Wilson unearths the trail left by Lewis and members of his extended family in Springfield. Reviewing the experiences of African Americans in that city, Wilson clarifies the economic, social, and political position of a black, middle-aged breadwinner during the difficult years of the early twentieth century.