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227 books match the query 'New England (CT, MA, ME, NH, RI, VT)' and 4 start with n

cover of Nathan Hale: The Life and Death of America's First Spy

Nathan Hale

The Life and Death of America's First Spy

M. William Phelps

University Press of New England, 2015

Although famous for his purported last words—“I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country”—few people know the real Nathan Hale. M. William Phelps brings into focus the life of this famed patriot and first spy of the American Revolution, charting Hale’s rural childhood, his education at Yale, and his work as a schoolteacher. Like many young Americans, he was soon drawn into the colonies’ war for independence and became a captain in Washington’s army. When the general was in need of a spy, Hale willingly rose to the challenge, gathering intelligence behind British lines on Long Island, and in the end bravely sacrificing his life for the sake of American liberty. Using Hale’s own journals and letters as well as testimonies from his friends and contemporaries, Phelps depicts the Revolution as it was seen from the ground. From the confrontation in Boston to the battle for New York City, readers experience what life was like for an ordinary soldier in the struggling Continental Army. In this impressive, well-researched biography, Phelps separates historical fact from long-standing myth to reveal the truth about Nathan Hale, a young man who deserves to be remembered as an original American patriot.
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cover of New England Metropolis: Boston and the Industrialization of New England, 1807–1850

New England Metropolis

Boston and the Industrialization of New England, 1807–1850

Richard Garver

University of Massachusetts Press, 2026

At the outset of the nineteenth century, Boston was at its zenith as a maritime city even as New England was in decline. Many struggling farmers abandoned the area for more promising opportunities to the west. Yet by 1850, New England had been transformed into one of the most industrialized regions in the world. Former agricultural villages had become specialized manufacturing towns producing consumer goods for sale, and Boston merchant capitalists had established textile complexes that produced fabrics in huge quantities. Although Boston had been superseded by New York as a trading center, it thrived not only as a financial market but as an exchange hub in which these hinterland manufacturers acquired raw materials, capital, sales services, and transportation. With Boston at its metropolitan center, New England was transformed into an industrial geography that was unique nationally and internationally.

New England Metropolis demonstrates that, in contrast to the course of industrialization in other regions of the country, New England’s transformation was driven by entrepreneurs in hundreds of rural villages and towns and by and Boston merchant capitalists who recruited underemployed agricultural household members to produce consumer goods for sale beyond the region, including in the slave economies of the South and the Caribbean. As Boston merchants adapted commercial, financial and transportation infrastructure they had developed to serve overseas trade to the needs of the region's manufacturers, industrialization halted New England’s decline and, by 1850, had propelled it to prosperity.

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cover of Northern Hospitality: Cooking by the Book in New England

Northern Hospitality

Cooking by the Book in New England

Keith Stavely

University of Massachusetts Press, 2011

If you think traditional New England cooking is little more than baked beans and clam chowder, think again. In this enticing anthology of almost 400 historic New England recipes from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century, you will be treated to such dishes as wine-soaked bass served with oysters and cranberries, roast shoulder of lamb seasoned with sweet herbs, almond cheesecake infused with rosewater, robust Connecticut brown bread, zesty ginger nuts, and high-peaked White Mountain cake.

Beginning with four chapters placing the region's best-known cookbook authors and their works in nuanced historical context, Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald then proceed to offer a ten-chapter cornucopia of culinary temptation. Readers can sample regional offerings grouped into the categories of the liquid one-pot meal, fish, fowl, meat and game, pie, pudding, bread, and cake. Recipes are presented in their original textual forms and are accompanied by commentaries designed to make them more accessible to the modern reader. Each chapter, and each section within each chapter, is also prefaced by a brief introductory essay. From pottage to pie crust, from caudle to calf's head, historic methods and obscure meanings are thoroughly—sometimes humorously—explained.

Going beyond reprints of single cookbooks and bland adaptations of historic recipes, this richly contextualized critical anthology puts the New England cooking tradition on display in all its unexpected--and delicious--complexity. Northern Hospitality will equip readers with all the tools they need for both historical understanding and kitchen adventure.
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cover of Not a Catholic Nation: The Ku Klux Klan Confronts New England in the 1920s

Not a Catholic Nation

The Ku Klux Klan Confronts New England in the 1920s

Mark Paul Richard

University of Massachusetts Press, 2015

During the 1920s the Ku Klux Klan experienced a remarkable resurgence, drawing millions of American men and women into its ranks. In Not a Catholic Nation, Mark Paul Richard examines the KKK's largely ignored growth in the six states of New England—Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont—and details the reactions of the region's Catholic population, the Klan's primary targets.

Drawing on a wide range of previously untapped sources—French-language newspapers in the New England–Canadian borderlands; KKK documents scattered in local, university, and Catholic repositories; and previously undiscovered copies of the Maine Klansmen—Richard demonstrates that the Klan was far more active in the Northeast than previously thought. He also challenges the increasingly prevalent view that the Ku Klux Klan became a mass movement during this period largely because it functioned as a social, fraternal, or civic organization for many Protestants. While Richard concedes that some Protestants in New England may have joined the KKK for those reasons, he shows that the politics of ethnicity and labor played a more significant role in the Klan's growth in the region.

The most comprehensive analysis of the Ku Klux Klan's antagonism toward Catholics in the 1920s, this book is also distinctive in its consideration of the history of the Canada–U.S. borderlands, particularly the role of Canadian immigrants as both proponents and victims of the Klan movement in the United States.
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