Download or read book Food for the Dead written by Michael E. Bell and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-16 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These stories of vampire legends and gruesome nineteenth-century practices is “a major contribution to the study of New England folk beliefs” (The Boston Globe). For nineteenth-century New Englanders, “vampires” lurked behind tuberculosis. To try to rid their houses and communities from the scourge of the wasting disease, families sometimes relied on folk practices, including exhuming and consuming the bodies of the deceased. Folklorist Michael E. Bell spent twenty years pursuing stories of the vampire in New England. While writers like H.P. Lovecraft, Henry David Thoreau, and Amy Lowell drew on portions of these stories in their writings, Bell brings the actual practices to light for the first time. He shows that the belief in vampires was widespread, and, for some families, lasted well into the twentieth century. With humor, insight, and sympathy, he uncovers story upon story of dying men, women, and children who believed they were food for the dead. “A marvelous book.” —Providence Journal Includes an updated preface covering newly discovered cases.
Download or read book Murder New England written by M. William Phelps and published by Lyons Press. This book was released on 2011-10-04 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: True tales of murder in New England, from the colonial period to today, chronicled by a true crime master, New York Times bestselling author, and star of Investigation Discovery's new television show Dark Minds
Download or read book The New England Primer written by John Cotton and published by . This book was released on 1885 with total page 52 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Dogtown written by Elyssa East and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2009-12-01 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The area known as Dogtown -- an isolated colonial ruin and surrounding 3,000-acre woodland in storied seaside Gloucester, Massachusetts -- has long exerted a powerful influence over artists, writers, eccentrics, and nature lovers. But its history is also woven through with tales of witches, supernatural sightings, pirates, former slaves, drifters, and the many dogs Revolutionary War widows kept for protection and for which the area was named. In 1984, a brutal murder took place there: a mentally disturbed local outcast crushed the skull of a beloved schoolteacher as she walked in the woods. Dogtown's peculiar atmosphere -- it is strewn with giant boulders and has been compared to Stonehenge -- and eerie past deepened the pall of this horrific event that continues to haunt Gloucester even today. In alternating chapters, Elyssa East interlaces the story of this grisly murder with the strange, dark history of this wilderness ghost town and explores the possibility that certain landscapes wield their own unique power. East knew nothing of Dogtown's bizarre past when she first became interested in the area. As an art student in the early 1990s, she fell in love with the celebrated Modernist painter Marsden Hartley's stark and arresting Dogtown landscapes. She also learned that in the 1930s, Dogtown saved Hartley from a paralyzing depression. Years later, struggling in her own life, East set out to find the mysterious setting that had changed Hartley's life, hoping that she too would find solace and renewal in Dogtown's odd beauty. Instead, she discovered a landscape steeped in intrigue and a community deeply ambivalent about the place: while many residents declare their passion for this profoundly affecting landscape, others avoid it out of a sense of foreboding. Throughout this richly braided first-person narrative, East brings Dogtown's enigmatic past to life. Losses sustained during the American Revolution dealt this once thriving community its final blow. Destitute war widows and former slaves took up shelter in its decaying homes until 1839, when the last inhabitant was taken to the poorhouse. He died seven days later. Dogtown has remained abandoned ever since, but continues to occupy many people's imaginations. In addition to Marsden Hartley, it inspired a Bible-thumping millionaire who carved the region's rocks with words to live by; the innovative and influential postmodernist poet Charles Olson, who based much of his epic Maximus Poems on Dogtown; an idiosyncratic octogenarian who vigilantly patrols the land to this day; and a murderer who claimed that the spirit of the woods called out to him. In luminous, insightful prose, Dogtown takes the reader into an unforgettable place brimming with tragedy, eccentricity, and fascinating lore, and examines the idea that some places can inspire both good and evil, poetry and murder.
Download or read book Legal Executions in New England written by Daniel Allen Hearn and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2015-08-13 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1623 and 1960 (the date of the last execution as of 1999), Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont legally put to death more than 700 men and women for a wide variety of capital crimes ranging from army desertion to murder. This is a companion volume to Legal Executions in New York State and Legal Executions in New Jersey, both published by McFarland. It is comprised of chronologically arranged biographical entries for the executed persons. Each entry gives personal data on the executed person, including age, ethnicity, and gender, as well as a detailed account of the crime for which he or she was sentenced to death and information on the place and method of execution. Fully indexed.
Download or read book Death in Early New England written by Robert A. Geake and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2023-07-24 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Death in early New England came early and often during those harsh first decades of settlement. Epidemics, hunger, accidents and childbirth contributed to a heavy toll in New England. Disease in some cases erased entire families, and almost always affected the majority of individuals in the communities. For most families, death was still a private affair. Traditions brought over with European customs and others that were strictly American were eventually interwoven, and these ceremonies, tokens and portraits of remembrance became part of these rites and rituals of mourning. Other forms of remembrance were carved into stone with heart-wrung epitaphs, the cause of death and brief biographies. Burial sites themselves evolved from family plots and church graveyards to public, garden-like cemeteries. Historian Robert A. Geake explores the development of rites and rituals of death in this New World.
Download or read book New England s Memorial written by Nathaniel Morton and published by . This book was released on 1826 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Burial and Death in Colonial North America written by Robyn S. Lacy and published by Emerald Group Publishing. This book was released on 2020-09-09 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the relationship and organization of 17th Century burial landscapes within their associated settlements and the wider setting of colonial northeast British North America to provide readers with a more holistic understanding of settlers’ relationship with mortality.
Download or read book A Death in Canaan written by Joan Barthel and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2016-01-19 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “riveting” true crime classic: The trial of Connecticut teen Peter Reilly, accused of killing his mother, and the community that defended him (People). In the sleepy hamlet of Canaan, Connecticut, Barbara Gibbons stood out. She and her eighteen-year-old son, Peter Reilly, lived in a drab one-bedroom house on a desolate stretch of road. An intelligent, lively woman with a wicked sense of humor, Barbara also had dark moods and drank too much. She fought loudly with neighbors and her son, and appeared to have a messy, complicated love life. When Peter came home from the Teen Center one night to discover his mother lying naked on the bedroom floor with her throat slashed, the police made him their prime suspect. After eight hours of interrogation and a polygraph test, Peter confessed. Investigators were convinced they had an open-and-shut case, but the townspeople disagreed. They couldn’t believe that the naïve teenager was capable of such a gruesome crime, and blamed detectives for taking advantage of the boy’s trust. With the help of celebrities including Mike Nichols and William Styron, who contributes an eloquent and persuasive introduction to Joan Barthel’s account of the case, the community of Canaan rallied to Peter’s defense. A gripping murder mystery and an intimate portrait of the loyalties, resentments, and secrets lurking beneath the placid surface of quiet towns across America, A Death in Canaan is a masterpiece of “first-class journalism” (The New York Times).
Download or read book Killing Season written by Carlton Smith and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2017-08-29 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times–bestselling journalist traces a string of unsolved murders—and the botched investigation that let the New Bedford Highway Killer walk away. Over the course of seven months in 1988, eleven women disappeared off the streets of New Bedford, Massachusetts, a gloomy, drug-addled coastal town that was once the whaling capital of the world. Nine turned up dead. Two were never found. And the perpetrator remains unknown to this day. How could such a thing happen? How, in what was once one of America’s richest cities, could the authorities let their most vulnerable citizens down this badly? As Carlton Smith, a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his coverage of the Green River Killer case, demonstrates in this riveting account, it was the inability of police officers and politicians alike to set aside their personal agendas that let a psychopath off the hook. In Killing Season, Smith takes readers into a close-knit community of working-class men and women, an underworld of prostitution and drug abuse, and the halls of New England law enforcement to tell the story of an epic failure of justice.
Download or read book A History of Death in 17th Century England written by Ben Norman and published by Pen and Sword History. This book was released on 2020-11-13 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A look at the constant confrontation with mortality the English experienced in a time of plague, smallpox, civil war, and other calamities. In the lives of the rich and poor alike in seventeenth-century England, death was a hovering presence, much more visible in everyday existence than it is today. It is a highly important and surprisingly captivating part of the epic story of England during the turbulent years of the 1600s. This book guides readers through the subject using a chronological approach, as would have been experienced by those living in the country at the time, beginning with the myriad causes of death, including rampant disease, war, and capital punishment, and finishing with an exploration of posthumous commemoration, including mass interments in times of disease, the burial of suicides, and the unconventional laying to rest of English Catholics. Although the people of the seventeenth century did not fully realize it, when it came to the confrontation of mortality they were living in wildly changing times.
Download or read book New England White written by Stephen L. Carter and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-06-26 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER Lemaster Carlyle, the president of the country's most prestigious university, and his wife, Julie, the divinity school's deputy dean, are America's most prominent and powerful African American couple. Driving home through a swirling blizzard late one night, the couple skids off the road. Near the sight of their accident they discover a dead body. To her horror, Julia recognizes the body as a prominent academic and one of her former lovers. In the wake of the death, the icy veneer of their town Elm Harbor, a place Julie calls "the heart of whiteness," begins to crack, having devastating consequences for a prominent local family and sending shock waves all the way to the White House.
Download or read book Cursed in New England written by Joseph A. Citro and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-08-01 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New Englanders are always cursing. But a colorful profanity uttered by some stero-typically taciturn old Yankee is usually more humorous than menacing. Yet, true maledictions (the opposite of benedictions) have frequently been spoken on New England soil, curses intended to invoke evil, injury, or total destruction against other people. Stories about preternatural revenge are numerous in Yankee lore, with each New England state providing its favorites. You’ll read about curses that were followed by the strange disappearance of a father and daughter in Rhode Island, mysterious afflictions in Massachusetts, a river of death in Maine, an unaccountable blight in New Hampshire, unexplained madness in Connecticut, and other eerie happenings from New England’s colorful history. Some are well known, at least regionally. Others are nearly forgotten. Within these pages, storyteller Joseph A. Citro vividly brings these tales to life, letting us decide if these tales of woe were bad luck or . . . something else.
Download or read book Death in Early New England Rites Rituals and Remembrance written by Robert A. Geake and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2023-07 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Death in early New England came early and often during those harsh first decades of settlement. Epidemics, hunger, accidents and childbirth contributed to a heavy toll in New England. Disease in some cases erased entire families, and almost always affected the majority of individuals in the communities. For most families, death was still a private affair. Traditions brought over with European customs and others that were strictly American were eventually interwoven, and these ceremonies, tokens and portraits of remembrance became part of these rites and rituals of mourning. Other forms of remembrance were carved into stone with heart-wrung epitaphs, the cause of death and brief biographies. Burial sites themselves evolved from family plots and church graveyards to public, garden-like cemeteries. Historian Robert A. Geake explores the development of rites and rituals of death in this New World.
Download or read book Mysteries and Legends of New England written by Diana Ross McCain and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2009-08-04 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mysteries and Legends of New England explores unusual phenomena, strange events, and mysteries in the region’s history—evenly divided between the New England States (Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island).
Download or read book A History of Vampires in New England written by Thomas D'Agostino and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2019-09-16 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of A Guide to Haunted New England lifts the coffin lid on the region’s folklore and legends of the undead. New England is rich in history and mystery. Numerous sleepy little towns and farming communities distinguish the region’s scenic tranquility. But not long ago, New Englanders lived in fear of spectral ghouls believed to rise from their graves and visit family members in the night to suck their lives away. Although the word “vampire” was never spoken, scores of families disinterred loved ones during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries searching for telltale signs that one of them might be what is now referred to as the New England vampire. “In his remarkable book . . . Thomas D’Agostino details the longstanding belief among New Englanders that supernatural entities were responsible for the disease called consumption.”—Crime Capsule Includes photos! Praise for A Guide to Haunted New England “Fun, charming . . . includes not only locales with reported ghosts, but also sites with macabre (though not haunted) histories.”—True Crime Librarian “Anyone interested in exploring the haunted, macabre and abandoned throughout New England knows they can count on D’Agostino to find out more about the site’s history, past sightings and how to find them.”—Mobile RVing
Download or read book Mercy written by Sarah L. Thomson and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No matter how old we are, or how far from home, our family remains with us - we share their looks and gestures, social values and concept of "home". Yet we often fail to connect with family members, and in remarkable ways our early experiences with family are repeated with marriage partners and children. In this revelatory book, esteemed family therapist Monica McGoldrick explores why families behave as they do, using genograms (family trees) to illustrate family patterns. Mapped out over a three-generation span, repeated estrangements, alliances, even divorces and suicides prove more than coincidental. McGoldrick uses the genograms of famous families - including the Kennedys, Hepburns, Beethovens, Brontes, and the family of the Marx Brothers - to discuss the influence of birth order and sibling rivalry, family myths and secrets, cultural differences, couple relationships, and the pivotal role of loss. Relevant questions we can ask ourselves appear at the end of each chapter, helping the reader to become researcher, uncovering information previously withheld, misunderstood, or overlooked. There is a saying, "Those who cannot remember the past are recommended to repeat it". The message here is positive: once we reconnect with the past, McGoldrick tells us, we can choose our futures.
