Results by title
227 books match the query 'New England (CT, MA, ME, NH, RI, VT)' and 7 start with w
Wabanaki Homeland and the New State of Maine
The 1820 Journal and Plans of Survey of Joseph TreatMicah A. Pawling
University of Massachusetts Press, 2007
Edited, annotated, and with an introduction by Micah Pawling, this volume includes a complete transcription of Treat's journal, reproductions of dozens of hand-drawn maps, and records pertaining to the 1820 treaty between the Penobscot Nation and the governing authorities of Maine. As Pawling points out, Treat's journal offers more than the observations of a state agent conducting a survey. It re-creates a dialogue between Euro-Americans and Native peoples, showing how different perceptions of the land were negotiated and disseminated, and exposing the tensions that surfaced when assumptions and expectations clashed. In large part because of Neptune's influence, the maps, in addition to detailing the location of Wabanaki settlements, reflect a river-oriented Native perspective that would later serve as a key to Euro-American access to the region's interior.
The groundwork for cooperation between Treat and Neptune had been laid during the 1820 treaty negotiations, in which both men participated and which were successfully concluded just over a month before their expedition departed from Bangor, Maine. Despite conflicting interests and mutual suspicions, they were able to work together and cultivate a measure of trust as they traveled across northern Maine and western New Brunswick, mapping an old world together while envisioning its uncertain future.
Walking Towards Walden
A Pilgrimage in Search of PlaceJohn Hanson Mitchell
University Press of New England, 2015
Went to the Devil
A Yankee Whaler in the Slave TradeAnthony J. Connors
University of Massachusetts Press, 2019
In this riveting biography, Anthony J. Connors explores this question by detailing not only the troubled, adventurous life of this man but also the turbulent times in which he lived. Set in an era of social and political fragmentation and impending civil war, when changes in maritime law and the economics of whaling emboldened slaving agents to target captains and their vessels for the illicit trade, Davoll's story reveals the deadly combination of greed and racial antipathy that encouraged otherwise principled Americans to participate in the African slave trade.
What We Know, What We Wish
Maine Statehood, Historical Commemoration, and the Urgency of Public HistoryEdited by Liam Riordan and Richard W. Judd
University of Massachusetts Press, 2025
Cities, states, and nations are grappling with how best to commemorate historical events and anniversaries in ways that are fair, accurate, and open public dialogue about the often contested past. This volume springs from varied approaches to the historical commemoration of Maine’s state bicentennial in 2020 that involved academics, independent scholars, local and statewide cultural organizations, sovereign Wabanaki nations, and the state itself in the form of the Maine State Bicentennial Commission. While wide-ranging in their goals and values, all sought to take advantage of opportunities for collaboration to contribute to a dynamic and multi-faceted practice of public history. These new essays use Maine’s bicentennial as a focal point to put public history theory into action. Its diverse contributors share stories about the past that move beyond celebration to reflect crucial ways that the past shapes our understanding of the present and our aspirations for the future.
This volume’s core argument is that academics need to collaborate more fully with independent scholars, history-based cultural institutions, and the general public in order for public history to thrive and to improve the quality of civic life. What We Know, What We Wish does this through wide ranging essays that discuss the long statehood era in Maine from the 1770s to 1820s as well as its legacies in the state centennial commemoration of 1920 and museum exhibits from the 2020 bicentennial. The occupational and cultural diversity of the collection’s contributors together with the content of their essays offer a model for how to put public history principles into practice to foreground meaningful historical reflection that is urgently needed in divided communities around the world.
Contributors include the volume editors, as well as Maulian Bryant, Osihkiyol (Zeke) Crofton-Macdonald, Charles H. Lagerbom, Ryan LaRochelle, Stuart Kestenbaum, Michael McVaugh, Kevin D. Murphy, Micah A. Pawling, Jessica Skwire Routhier, Donald Soctomah, Laura Fecych Sprague, Alan Taylor, and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich.
Wit and Wisdom
The Forgotten Literary Life of New England VillagesJoan Newlon Radner
University of Massachusetts Press, 2023
The lyceum movement gained momentum in the decades preceding the Civil War, presenting members with the opportunity to participate in literary life and engage with the issues of the day. While urban lyceums played host to a who’s who of nineteenth-century intellectual life, literary societies also cropped up in thousands of villages across the nation, acting as influential sites of learning, creativity, and community engagement. In rural New England, ordinary men and women, farmers and intelligentsia, selectmen and schoolchildren came together to write and perform poetry and witty parodies and debate a wide range of topics, from women’s rights and temperance to slavery, migration, and more.
Wit and Wisdom takes readers inside this long-forgotten tradition, providing new access to the vibrant voices, surprising talents, and understated humor on display on many a cold winter’s night. Having uncovered dozens of handwritten newspapers produced by village lyceums across Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Massachusetts, Joan Newlon Radner proves that these close-knit groups offered a vital expression of the beliefs, ambitions, and resilience of rural New Englanders.
Women of the Commonwealth
Work, Family, and Social Change in Ninteenth-Century MassachusettsSusan L. Porter
University of Massachusetts Press, 1996
These essays reflect the complexity and richness of current scholarship in women's history. Informed by a variety of source materials and methodologies, the ten chapters break down a generalized construct of “womanhood” to explore the dynamics between gender, race, ethnicity, and class.
The first section of the book focuses on women's work, paid and unpaid, and the effects of class, ethnicity, and gender on the structure of the job market and on power relations within the family. The second section revisits the concept of “sisterhood” by looking at women in relation to their families, social and cultural networks, and civic and private institutions. The editor's introduction sets the essays in the current historiographical context of women's studies and provides a bibliographical essay for the nonspecialist reader.
Words, Works, and Ways of Knowing
The Breakdown of Moral Philosophy in New England before the Civil WarSara Paretsky
University of Chicago Press, 2016
What’s less well-known is that before Paretsky began her writing career, she earned a PhD in history from the University of Chicago with a dissertation on moral philosophy and religion in New England in the early and mid-nineteenth century. Now, for the first time, fans of Paretsky can read that earliest work, Words, Works, and Ways of Knowing.
Paretsky here analyzes attempts by theologians at Andover Seminary, near Boston, to square and secure Calvinist religious beliefs with emerging knowledge from history and the sciences. She carefully shows how the open-minded scholasticism of these theologians paradoxically led to the weakening of their intellectual credibility as conventional religious belief structures became discredited, and how this failure then incited reactionary forces within Calvinism. That conflict between science and religion in the American past is of interest on its face, but it also sheds light on contemporary intellectual battles.
Rounding out the book, leading religious scholar Amanda Porterfield provides an afterword discussing where Paretsky’s work fits into the contemporary study of religion. And in a sobering—sometimes shocking—preface, Paretsky paints a picture of what it was like to be a female graduate student at the University of Chicago in the 1970s. A treat for Paretsky’s many fans, this book offers a glimpse of the development of the mind behind the mysteries.