Download or read book A New England Town written by Kenneth A. Lockridge and published by New York : Norton. This book was released on 1970 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Real Democracy written by Frank M. Bryan and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-03-15 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Relying on an astounding collection of more than three decades of firsthand research, Frank M. Bryan examines one of the purest forms of American democracy, the New England town meeting. At these meetings, usually held once a year, all eligible citizens of the town may become legislators; they meet in face-to-face assemblies, debate the issues on the agenda, and vote on them. And although these meetings are natural laboratories for democracy, very few scholars have systematically investigated them. A nationally recognized expert on this topic, Bryan has now done just that. Studying 1,500 town meetings in his home state of Vermont, he and his students recorded a staggering amount of data about them—238,603 acts of participation by 63,140 citizens in 210 different towns. Drawing on this evidence as well as on evocative "witness" accounts—from casual observers to no lesser a light than Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—Bryan paints a vivid picture of how real democracy works. Among the many fascinating questions he explores: why attendance varies sharply with town size, how citizens resolve conflicts in open forums, and how men and women behave differently in town meetings. In the end, Bryan interprets this brand of local government to find evidence for its considerable staying power as the most authentic and meaningful form of direct democracy. Giving us a rare glimpse into how democracy works in the real world, Bryan presents here an unorthodox and definitive book on this most cherished of American institutions.
Download or read book Puritan Village written by Sumner Chilton Powell and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-12 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pulitzer Prize Winner: “A meticulous and remarkably detailed account of the early government and social organization of the town of Sudbury, Massachusetts.” —Time In addition to drawing on local records from Sudbury, Massachusetts, the author of this classic work, which won the Pulitzer Prize in History, traced the town’s early families back to England to create an outstanding portrait of a colonial settlement in the seventeenth century. He looks at the various individuals who formed this new society; how institutions and government took shape; what changed—or didn’t—in the movement from the Old World to the New; and how those from different local cultures adjusted, adapted, competed, and cooperated to plant the seeds of what would become, in the century to follow, a commonwealth of the United States of America. “An important and interesting book . . . to the student of institutions, even to the sociologist, as well as to the historian.” —The New England Quarterly
Download or read book Lost Towns of New England written by Renee Mallett and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2021-09-27 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New England is home to abandoned towns and forgotten main streets that once bustled with life and commerce. From villages sunk underwater to cities undone by the rise and fall of mill life, madness or just plain bad luck, these ghost towns offer a unique look into the rich history of the past. Get a glimpse into what early life was really like through historical accounts of abandoned villages. Discover the history behind the ruins of towns like Connecticut's religious community Gay City, the former New Hampshire resort town of Unity Springs and Massachusetts's famed Dogtown--before nature reclaims them entirely. Join local author Renee Mallett as she uncovers the heydays of some of New England's most fascinating lost towns.
Download or read book Creating New England Villages written by Evan J. Kern and published by Stackpole Books. This book was released on 1998 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Create charming and historically accurate miniature buildings from New England's past. Easy instructions explain every step in the process--from cutting and gluing to coloring and finishing. Projects include a sugarhouse, covered bridge, Cape Cod house, church, lighthouse, gristmill, and more. 36 color photos, 38 drawings.
Download or read book The New England Town Meeting written by Joseph F. Zimmerman and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 1999-03-30 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this groundbreaking study, Zimmerman explores the town meeting form of government in all New England states. This comprehensive work relies heavily upon surveys of town officers and citizens, interviews, and mastery of the scattered writing on the subject. Zimmerman finds that the stereotypes of the New England open town meeting advanced by its critics are a serious distortion of reality. He shows that voter superintendence of town affairs has proven to be effective, and there is no empirical evidence that thousands of small towns and cities with elected councils are governed better. Whereas the relatively small voter attendance suggests that interest groups can control town meetings, their influence has been offset effectively by the development of town advisory committees, particularly the finance committee and the planning board, which are effective counterbalances to pressure groups. Zimmerman provides a new conception of town meeting democracy, positing that the meeting is a de facto representative legislative body with two safety valves—open access to all voters and the initiative to add articles to the warrant, and the calling of special meetings to reconsider decisions made at the preceding town meeting. And, as Zimmerman points out, a third safety valve—the protest referendum—can be adopted by a town meeting.
Download or read book Westport Connecticut written by Woody Klein and published by Praeger. This book was released on 2000 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This well-documented journey into the past illuminates the special character and sense of place that is Westport, Connecticut. It offers the reader a keen insight into the unusual tapestry of life in this town, woven by a combination of colonial farmers, immigrants who built Westport, and celebrities from the arts, the professions, politics, and corporate America who have made this widely acclaimed town their home."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Reclaiming the Commons written by Brian Donahue and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2001-01-01 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lively account of a community working to combat suburban sprawl, and how it discovers how to live responsibly on the land.
Download or read book Town Born written by Barry Levy and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, British colonists found the New World full of resources. With land readily available but workers in short supply, settlers developed coercive forms of labor—indentured servitude and chattel slavery—in order to produce staple export crops like rice, wheat, and tobacco. This brutal labor regime became common throughout most of the colonies. An important exception was New England, where settlers and their descendants did most work themselves. In Town Born, Barry Levy shows that New England's distinctive and far more egalitarian order was due neither to the colonists' peasant traditionalism nor to the region's inhospitable environment. Instead, New England's labor system and relative equality were every bit a consequence of its innovative system of governance, which placed nearly all land under the control of several hundred self-governing town meetings. As Levy shows, these town meetings were not simply sites of empty democratic rituals but were used to organize, force, and reconcile laborers, families, and entrepreneurs into profitable export economies. The town meetings protected the value of local labor by persistently excluding outsiders and privileging the town born. The town-centered political economy of New England created a large region in which labor earned respect, relative equity ruled, workers exercised political power despite doing the most arduous tasks, and the burdens of work were absorbed by citizens themselves. In a closely observed and well-researched narrative, Town Born reveals how this social order helped create the foundation for American society.
Download or read book New England Outpost written by Richard I. Melvoin and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 1992-02 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Deerfield's first half-century, starting in 1670, was a struggle to survive numerous Indian attacks. But more than a site of bloodshed, Deerfield offers an extraordinary opportunity to study larger issues of colonial war and society.
Download or read book Peaceable Kingdoms written by Michael Zuckerman and published by Acls History E-Book Project. This book was released on 2008-11-01 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Markets of New England written by Christine Chitnis and published by Little Bookroom. This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christine Chitnis has crisscrossed New England discovering farmers markets and crafts markets, and in this book fifty of the most vibrant, unique and thriving events in the region are described and lavishly photographed.
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 The New England Village written by Joseph S. Wood and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2002-09-24 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New England colonists, Wood argues, brought with them a cultural predisposition toward dispersed settlements within agricultural spaces called "towns" and "villages." Rarely compact in form, these communities did, however, encourage individual landholding. By the early nineteenth century, town centers, where meetinghouses stood, began to develop into the center villages we recognize today. Just as rural New England began its economic decline, Wood shows, romantics associated these proto-urban places with idealized colonial village communities as the source of both village form and commercial success.
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 Life in a New England Mill Town written by Sally Senzell Isaacs and published by Capstone Classroom. This book was released on 2002-06-07 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An overview of life in a nineteenth-century town in which most people worked in the textile mill, including their housing, food, clothing, schools, and everyday activities.
Download or read book Confronting Urban Legacy written by Xiangming Chen and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2013-10-18 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Confronting Urban Legacy fills a critical lacuna in urban scholarship. As almost all of the literature focuses on global cities and megacities, smaller, secondary cities, which actually hold the majority of the world’s population, are either critically misunderstood or unexamined in their entirety. This neglect not only biases scholars’ understanding of social and spatial dynamics toward very large global cities but also maintains a void in students’ learning. This book specifically explores the transformative relationship between globalization and urban transition in Hartford, Connecticut, while including crucial comparative chapters on other forgotten New England cities: Portland, Maine, along with Lawrence and Springfield, Massachusetts. Hartford’s transformation carries a striking imprint of globalization that has been largely missed: from its 17th century roots as New England first inland colonial settlement, to its emergence as one of the world’s most prosperous manufacturing and insurance metropolises, to its present configuration as one of America’s poorest post-industrial cities, which by still retaining a globally lucrative FIRE Sector is nevertheless surrounded by one of the nation’s most prosperous metropolitan regions. The myriad of dilemmas confronting Hartford calls for this book to take an interdisciplinary approach. The editors’ introduction places Hartford in a global comparative perspective; Part I provides rich historical delineations of the many rises and (not quite) falls of Hartford; Part II offers a broad contemporary treatment of Hartford by dissecting recent immigration and examining the demographic and educational dimensions of the city-suburban divide; and Part III unpacks Hartford’s current social, economic, and political situation and discusses what the city could become. Using the lessons from this book on Hartford and other underappreciated secondary cities in New England, urban scholars, leaders, and residents alike can gain a number of essential insights—both theoretical and practical.
