Download or read book Pastkeepers in a Small Place written by Michael C. Batinski and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How ordinary people use the past to shape their sense of self and community; People know who they are by fixing themselves in place and time. They keep the past in numerous ways - not simply by writing histories but also by telling stories, creating pictures, collecting memorabilia, preserving old homes, and tracing genealogies. As Michael C. Batinski shows in this imaginative study, the pastkeepers of Deerfield, Massachusetts, have long illustrated this human yearning to connect with past and place. For five centuries people in this small New England town have passed stories from one generation to the next, preserved homes, and established one of the nation's first historical societies and local history museums. Like many small places in the American landscape, Batinski points out, Deerfield does not fit into the history we learn in textbooks. With the exception of the famous French and Indian raid on the town in 1704, nothing of national significance has happened there. Yet that has not diminished the interest of local inhabitants in establishing and maintaining a vital connection to the past. Different groups, from Native Pocumtuck to Puritan settlers to the grandchildren of Pol

Download or read book Here and Everywhere Else written by Andrew Witmer and published by UMass + ORM. This book was released on 2022-06-24 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of an Award of Excellence, American Association for State and Local History (AASLH) In 1822, settlers pushed north from Massachusetts and other parts of New England into Monson, Maine. On land taken from the Penobscot people, they established prosperous farms and businesses. Focusing on the microhistory of this village, Andrew Witmer reveals the sometimes surprising ways that this small New England town engaged with the wider world across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Townspeople fought and died in distant wars, transformed the economy and landscape with quarries and mills, and used railroads, highways, print, and new technologies to forge connections with the rest of the nation. Here and Everywhere Else starts with Monson’s incorporation in the early nineteenth century, when central Maine was considered the northern frontier and over 90 percent of Americans still lived in rural areas; it ends with present-day attempts to revive this declining Maine town into an artists’ colony. Engagingly written, with colorful portraits of local characters and landmarks, this study illustrates how the residents of this remote place have remade their town by integrating (and resisting) external influences.

Download or read book Memory Lands written by Christine M. Delucia and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-01 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A powerful study of King Philip's War and its enduring effects on histories, memories, and places in Native New England from 1675 to the present

Download or read book Forgetting and the Forgotten written by Michael C. Batinski and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2022-01-03 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dispossessing : land and past -- Squaring the circles, filling the squares -- Settlers and transients -- Civil wars and silences -- Gilding the past -- Passersby, rich and penniless -- Reconstruction and race.

Download or read book Designs on the Heart written by Karal Ann Marling and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2006-05-29 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In this book Karal Ann Marling looks at Grandma Moses as a cultural phenomenon of the postwar period and explores the meaning of her subject matter - and her astonishing fame. What did the "Greatest Generation" see in her simple renderings of people, young and old, tapping maple trees for syrup, making apple butter, gliding across snowy fields on sleighs? Why did Bob Hope, Irving Berlin, and Harry Truman all love her - and the art czars' of New York openly despise her? Through the flood of Moses merchandise - splashed across Christmas cards, dishware, yard goods, and gewgaws of every kind - Marling traces the resonances that these "primitive" images struck in an America awkwardly adjusting to a new era of technology, suburbia, and Cold War tensions.".

Download or read book An Accidental History of Canada written by Megan J. Davies and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2024-07-15 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although Canadian history has no shortage of stories about disasters and accidents, the phenomena of risk, upset, and misfortune have been largely overlooked by historians. Disasters get their due, but not so the smaller-scale accident where fate is more intimate. Yet such events often have a vivid afterlife in the communities where they happen, and the way in which they are explained and remembered has significant social, cultural, and political meaning. An Accidental History of Canada brings together original studies of an intriguing range of accidents stretching from the 1630s to the 1970s. These include workplace, domestic, childhood, and leisure accidents in colonial, Indigenous, rural, and urban settings. Whether arising from colonial power relations, urban dangers, perils in resource extraction, or hazardous recreations, most accidents occur within circumstances of vulnerability, and reveal precarity and inequities not otherwise apparent. Contributors to this volume are alert to the intersections of the settler agenda and the elevation of risk that it brings. Indigenous and settler ways of understanding accidents are juxtaposed, with chapters exploring the links between accidents and the rise of the modern state. An Accidental History of Canada makes plain that whether they are interpreted as an intervention by providence, a miscalculation, an inevitability, or the result of observable risk, accidents – and our responses to them – reveal shared values.

Download or read book Entangled Lives written by Marla Miller and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2019-12-17 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An enlightening look at American women's work in the late eighteenth century. What was women's work truly like in late eighteenth-century America, and what does it tell us about the gendered social relations of labor in the early republic? In Entangled Lives, Marla R. Miller examines the lives of Anglo-, African, and Native American women in one rural New England community—Hadley, Massachusetts—during the town's slow transformation following the Revolutionary War. Peering into the homes, taverns, and farmyards of Hadley, Miller offers readers an intimate history of the working lives of these women and their vital role in the local economy. Miller, a longtime resident of Hadley, follows a handful of eighteenth-century women working in a variety of occupations: domestic service, cloth making, health and healing, and hospitality. She asks about the social openings and opportunities this work created—and the limitations it placed on ordinary lives. Her compelling stories about women's everyday work, grounded in the material culture, built environment, and landscapes of rural western Massachusetts, reveal the larger economic networks in which Hadley operated and the subtle shifts that accompanied the emergence of the middle class in that rural community. Ultimately, this book shows how work differentiated not only men and woman but also race and class as Miller follows young, mostly white women working in domestic service, African American women negotiating labor in enslavement and freedom, and women of the rural gentry acting as both producers and employers. Engagingly written and featuring fascinating characters, the book deftly takes us inside a society and shows us how it functions. Offering an intervention into larger conversations about local history, microhistory, and historical scholarship, Entangled Lives is a revealing journey through early America.

Download or read book Historical and Archaeological Perspectives on Gender Transformations written by Suzanne M. Spencer-Wood and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-09 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In many facets of Western culture, including archaeology, there remains a legacy of perceiving gender divisions as natural, innate, and biological in origin. This belief follows that men are naturally pre-disposed to public, intellectual pursuits, while women are innately designed to care for the home and take care of children. In the interpretation of material culture, accepted notions of gender roles are often applied to new findings: the dichotomy between the domestic sphere of women and the public sphere of men can color interpretations of new materials. In this innovative volume, the contributors focus explicitly on analyzing the materiality of historic changes in the domestic sphere around the world. Combining a global scope with great temporal depth, chapters in the volume explore how gender ideologies, identities, relationships, power dynamics, and practices were materially changed in the past, thus showing how they could be changed in the future.

Download or read book Maine Photography written by Libby Bischof and published by Down East Books. This book was released on 2023-11-22 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maine has always played a rich and varied role in the art of photography. For hundreds of years, photographers, like other artists, have made their way to Maine to capture the natural beauty and human culture of the state. So, too, have many photographers come from Maine, and many contributions by Mainers have been made to the medium. Maine in Photography is the first comprehensive overview of the history of photography in the state. Providing basic knowledge of the most important people and institutions to have promoted photography, this volume also studies the ways in which photography has informed the understanding of the social and cultural history of Maine. Beginning with the earliest daguerreotype portraits of the 1840s, this history traces the growth of the medium—emphasizing key contributions, such as the Stanley brothers’ invention of the dry plate process—through to the present. Key topics addressed throughout the book include the importance of photography in documenting labor and economic life, the close relationship between photography and the growth of tourism, and the role of Maine photographers in advancing the medium as a fine art form. Published in conjunction with the Maine Photo Project, this is a unique and timely addition to the body of work on the importance of Maine to American art.

Download or read book Nineteenth Century Photographs and Architecture written by Micheline Nilsen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eschewing the limiting idea that nineteenth-century architecture photography merely reflects functionality, the objective of this collection is to reflect the aesthetic, intellectual, and cultural concerns of the time. The essays hold appeal for social and cultural historians, as well as those with an interest in the fields of art history, urban geography, history of travel and tourism. Nineteenth-century photographers captured what could be seen and what they wanted to be seen. Their images informed of exploration, progress, heritage, and destruction. Architecture was a staple subject for the first generation of photographers as it patiently tolerated the long exposures of the early processes. During its formative decades photography responded to evolutionary cultural forces of market and artistic production. Photographs of architecture reflected a specific political or social context modulated through individual points of view. For this reason, the examination of each photographic image as a primary visual document and an aesthetic object rather than a technical milestone on a chronological trajectory affords a richer multi-faceted approach to the extensive and complex corpus of photographs taken by photographers all over the world. This project acknowledges the importance of technique in the early decades of photography but focuses on the thematic content of the material. It places the photography of architecture in an international context under the contemporary critical lens sharpened by theoretical and cultural examinations of the topic.

Download or read book Liminality Hybridity and American Women s Literature written by Kristin J. Jacobson and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-05-04 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book highlights the multiplicity of American women’s writing related to liminality and hybridity from its beginnings to the contemporary moment. Often informed by notions of crossing, intersectionality, transition, and transformation, these concepts as they appear in American women’s writing contest as well as perpetuate exclusionary practices involving class, ethnicity, gender, race, religion, and sex, among other variables. The collection’s introduction, three unit introductions, fourteen individual essays, and afterward facilitate a process of encounters, engagements, and conversations within, between, among, and across the rich polyphony that constitutes the creative acts of American women writers. The contributors offer fresh perspectives on canonical writers as well as introduce readers to new authors. As a whole, the collection demonstrates American women’s writing is “threshold writing,” or writing that occupies a liminal, hybrid space that both delimits borders and offers enticing openings.

Download or read book Archives of Desire written by J. Samaine Lockwood and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2015-09-14 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this thought-provoking study of nineteenth-century America, J. Samaine Lockwood offers an important new interpretation of the literary movement known as American regionalism. Lockwood argues that regionalism in New England was part of a widespread woman-dominated effort to rewrite history. Lockwood demonstrates that New England regionalism was an intellectual endeavor that overlapped with colonial revivalism and included fiction and history writing, antique collecting, colonial home restoration, and photography. The cohort of writers and artists leading this movement included Sarah Orne Jewett, Alice Morse Earle, and C. Alice Baker, and their project was taken up by women of a younger generation, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, who extended regionalism through the modernist moment. Lockwood draws on a diverse archive that includes fiction, material culture, collecting guides, and more. Showing how these women intellectuals aligned themselves with a powerful legacy of social and cultural dissent, Lockwood reveals that New England regionalism performed queer historical work, placing unmarried women and their myriad desires at the center of both regional and national history.

Download or read book The Archaeology of Race in the Northeast written by Christopher N. Matthews and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2015-04-28 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historical and archaeological records show that racism and white supremacy defined the social fabric of the northeastern states as much as they did the Deep South. This collection of essays looks at both new sites and well-known areas to explore race, resistance, and supremacy in the region. With essays covering farm communities and cities from the early seventeenth century to the late nineteenth century, the contributors examine the marginalization of minorities and use the material culture to illustrate the significance of race in understanding daily life. Drawing on historical resources and critical race theory, they highlight the context of race at these sites, noting the different experiences of various groups, such as African American and Native American communities. This cutting-edge research turns with new focus to the dynamics of race and racism in early American life and demonstrates the coming of age of racialization studies.

Download or read book Creating Kashubia written by Joshua C. Blank and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2016-04-04 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, over one million Canadians have claimed Polish heritage - a significant population increase since the first group of Poles came from Prussian-occupied Poland and settled in Wilno, Ontario, west of Ottawa in 1858. For over a century, descendants from this community thought of themselves as Polish, but this began to change in the 1980s due to the work of a descendant priest who emphasized the community’s origins in Poland’s Kashubia region. What resulted was the reinvention of ethnicity concurrent with a similar movement in northern Poland. Creating Kashubia chronicles more than one hundred and fifty years of history, identity, and memory and challenges the historiography of migration and settlement in the region. For decades, authors from outside Wilno, as well as community insiders, have written histories without using the other’s stores of knowledge. Joshua Blank combines primary archival material and oral history with national narratives and a rich secondary literature to reimagine the period. He examines the socio-political and religious forces in Prussia, delves into the world of emigrant recruitment, and analyzes the trans-Atlantic voyage. In doing so, Blank challenges old narratives and traces the refashioning of the community’s ethnic identity from Polish to Kashubian. An illuminating study, Creating Kashubia shows how changing identities and the politics of ethnic memory are locally situated yet transnationally influenced.

Download or read book Distant Horizons written by Ted Underwood and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-02-14 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Just as a traveler crossing a continent won’t sense the curvature of the earth, one lifetime of reading can’t grasp the largest patterns organizing literary history. This is the guiding premise behind Distant Horizons, which uses the scope of data newly available to us through digital libraries to tackle previously elusive questions about literature. Ted Underwood shows how digital archives and statistical tools, rather than reducing words to numbers (as is often feared), can deepen our understanding of issues that have always been central to humanistic inquiry. Without denying the usefulness of time-honored approaches like close reading, narratology, or genre studies, Underwood argues that we also need to read the larger arcs of literary change that have remained hidden from us by their sheer scale. Using both close and distant reading to trace the differentiation of genres, transformation of gender roles, and surprising persistence of aesthetic judgment, Underwood shows how digital methods can bring into focus the larger landscape of literary history and add to the beauty and complexity we value in literature.

Download or read book Historic Real Estate written by Whitney Martinko and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2020-05-15 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A detailed study of early historical preservation efforts between the 1780s and the 1850s In Historic Real Estate, Whitney Martinko shows how Americans in the fledgling United States pointed to evidence of the past in the world around them and debated whether, and how, to preserve historic structures as permanent features of the new nation's landscape. From Indigenous mounds in the Ohio Valley to Independence Hall in Philadelphia; from Benjamin Franklin's childhood home in Boston to St. Philip's Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina; from Dutch colonial manors of the Hudson Valley to Henry Clay's Kentucky estate, early advocates of preservation strove not only to place boundaries on competitive real estate markets but also to determine what should not be for sale, how consumers should behave, and how certain types of labor should be valued. Before historic preservation existed as we know it today, many Americans articulated eclectic and sometimes contradictory definitions of architectural preservation to work out practical strategies for defining the relationship between public good and private profit. In arguing for the preservation of houses of worship and Indigenous earthworks, for example, some invoked the "public interest" of their stewards to strengthen corporate control of these collective spaces. Meanwhile, businessmen and political partisans adopted preservation of commercial sites to create opportunities for, and limits on, individual profit in a growing marketplace of goods. And owners of old houses and ancestral estates developed methods of preservation to reconcile competing demands for the seclusion of, and access to, American homes to shape the ways that capitalism affected family economies. In these ways, individuals harnessed preservation to garner political, economic, and social profit from the performance of public service. Ultimately, Martinko argues, by portraying the problems of the real estate market as social rather than economic, advocates of preservation affirmed a capitalist system of land development by promising to make it moral.

Download or read book An Archaeology of Improvement in Rural Massachusetts written by Quentin Lewis and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-11-25 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book probes the materiality of Improvement in early 19th century rural Massachusetts. Improvement was a metaphor for human intervention in the dramatic changes taking place to the English speaking world in the 18th and 19th centuries as part of a transition to industrial capitalism. The meaning of Improvement vacillated between ideas of economic profit and human betterment, but in practice, Improvement relied on a broad assemblage of material things and spaces for coherence and enaction. Utilizing archaeological data from the home of a wealthy farmer in rural Western Massachusetts, as well as an analysis of early Republican agricultural publications, this book shows how Improvement’s twin meanings of profit and betterment unfolded unevenly across early 19th century New England. The Improvement movement in Massachusetts emerged at a time of great social instability, and served to ameliorate growing tensions between urban and rural socioeconomic life through a rationalization of space. Alongside this rationalization, Improvement also served to reshape rural landscapes in keeping with the social and economic processes of a modernizing global capitalism. But the contradictions inherent in such processes spurred and buttressed wealth inequality, ecological distress, and social dislocation.