Book picks similar to
The Belles of New England: The Women of the Textile Mills and the Families Whose Wealth They Wove by William Moran
history
non-fiction
nonfiction
new-england
Through Women's Eyes: An American History With Documents
Ellen Carol DuBois - 2005
history while ensuring a balanced sense of the broad diversity of American women. Modeling for students how historians gather and interpret evidence, DuBois and Dumenil provide a textbook rooted in recent scholarship yet accessible to all introductory students.
I Remember Laura: Laura Ingalls Wilder
Stephen W. Hines - 1994
A scrapbook collection by the editor of Little House in the Ozarks features stories, letters, interviews, and recollections of Laura Ingalls Wilder in her youth and adult years, and includes rare photos and Ma's famous pickle recipe.
Betsy Ross and the Making of America
Marla R. Miller - 2010
Drawing on new sources and bringing a fresh, keen eye to the fabled creation of "the first flag," Marla R. Miller thoroughly reconstructs the life behind the legend. This authoritative work provides a close look at the famous seamstress while shedding new light on the lives of the artisan families who peopled the young nation and crafted its tools, ships, and homes.Betsy Ross occupies a sacred place in the American consciousness, and Miller's winning narrative finally does her justice. This history of the ordinary craftspeople of the Revolutionary War and their most famous representative will be the definitive volume for years to come.
A Great and Noble Scheme: The Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadians from Their American Homeland
John Mack Faragher - 2005
The right of neutrality; to live in peace from the imperial wars waged between France and England; had been one of the founding values of Acadia; its settlers traded and intermarried freely with native Mikmaq Indians and English Protestants alike. But the Acadians' refusal to swear unconditional allegiance to the British Crown in the mid-eighteenth century gave New Englanders, who had long coveted Nova Scotia's fertile farmland, pretense enough to launch a campaign of ethnic cleansing on a massive scale. John Mack Faragher draws on original research to weave 150 years of history into a gripping narrative of both the civilization of Acadia and the British plot to destroy it.
A History of Women in America
Carol Hymowitz - 1978
Against the backdrop of major historical events and movements, the authors examine the issues that changed the roles and lives of women in our society. Includes photographs.
Volcano Cowboys: The Rocky Evolution of a Dangerous Science
Dick Thompson - 2000
Now a group of brave scientists are working to understand the actual conditions that cause eruptions, how to predict them, and what we can do, if anything, to temper their destructiveness. Thompson, a Time magazine correspondent, takes us from the May 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens in Washington state through new concentrated efforts to construct a wider-reaching and more rigid discipline.Thompson spent many hours with the relative handful of scientists whom he calls "volcano cowboys." They have loaned him their field notes and shared personal stories. That vivid material combined with Thompson's ability to bring a good story to life has resulted in a book that celebrates these "cowboys," their hazardous lives, and the often harrowing decisions they must make.
A Civil Action
Jonathan Harr - 1995
After finding that her child is diagnosed with leukemia, Anne Anderson notices a high prevalence of leukemia, a relatively rare disease, in her city. Eventually she gathers other families and seeks a lawyer, Jan Schlichtmann, to consider their options.Schlichtmann originally decides not to take the case due to both the lack of evidence and a clear defendant. Later picking up the case, Schlichtmann finds evidence suggesting trichloroethylene (TCE) contamination of the town's water supply by Riley Tannery, a subsidiary of Beatrice Foods; a chemical company, W. R. Grace; and another company named Unifirst.In the course of the lawsuit Schlichtmann gets other attorneys to assist him. He spends lavishly as he had in his prior lawsuits, but the length of the discovery process and trial stretch all of their assets to their limit.
The Birth of the Republic, 1763-89
Edmund S. Morgan - 1956
Edmund S. Morgan's classic account of the Revolutionary period shows how the challenge of British taxation started the Americans on a search for constitutional principles to protect their freedom and eventually led to the Revolution.Morgan demonstrates that these principles were not abstract doctrines of political theory but grew instead out of the immediate needs and experiences of the colonists. They were held with passionate conviction, and incorporated, finally, into the constitutions of the new American states and of the United States.Though the basic theme of the book and his assessment of what the Revolution achieved remain the same, Morgan has updated the revised edition of The Birth of the Republic (1977) to include some textual and stylistic changes as well as a substantial revision of the Bibliographic Note.
The Atomic City Girls
Janet Beard - 2018
Oak Ridge, Tennessee has sprung up in a matter of months—a town of trailers and segregated houses, 24-hour cafeterias, and constant security checks. There, June joins hundreds of other young girls operating massive machines whose purpose is never explained. They know they are helping to win the war, but must ask no questions and reveal nothing to outsiders.The girls spend their evenings socializing and flirting with soldiers, scientists, and workmen at dances and movies, bowling alleys and canteens. June longs to know more about their top-secret assignment and begins an affair with Sam Cantor, the young Jewish physicist from New York who oversees the lab where she works and understands the end goal only too well, while her beautiful roommate Cici is on her own mission: to find a wealthy husband and escape her sharecropper roots. Across town, African-American construction worker Joe Brewer knows nothing of the government’s plans, only that his new job pays enough to make it worth leaving his family behind, at least for now. But a breach in security will intertwine his fate with June’s search for answers.When the bombing of Hiroshima brings the truth about Oak Ridge into devastating focus, June must confront her ideals about loyalty, patriotism, and war itself.
Stone by Stone: The Magnificent History in New England's Stone Walls
Robert M. Thorson - 2002
They took three billion man-hours to build. And even though most are crumbling today, they contain a magnificent scientific and cultural story—about the geothermal forces that formed their stones, the tectonic movements that brought them to the surface, the glacial tide that broke them apart, the earth that held them for so long, and about the humans who built them.Stone walls tell nothing less than the story of how New England was formed, and in Robert Thorson's hands they live and breathe. "The stone wall is the key that links the natural history and human history of New England," Thorson writes. Millions of years ago, New England's stones belonged to ancient mountains thrust up by prehistoric collisions between continents. During the Ice Age, pieces were cleaved off by glaciers and deposited—often hundreds of miles away—when the glaciers melted. Buried again over centuries by forest and soil buildup, the stones gradually worked their way back to the surface, only to become impediments to the farmers cultivating the land in the eighteenth century, who piled them into "linear landfills," a place to hold the stones. Usually the biggest investment on a farm, often exceeding that of the land and buildings combined, stone walls became a defining element of the Northeast's landscape, and a symbol of the shift to an agricultural economy.Stone walls layer time like Russian dolls, their smallest elements reflecting the longest spans, and Thorson urges us to study them, for each stone has its own story. Linking geological history to the early American experience, Stone by Stone presents a fascinating picture of the land the Pilgrims settled, allowing us to see and understand it with new eyes.
The Zookeeper's Wife
Diane Ackerman - 2007
With most of their animals dead, zookeepers Jan and Antonina Zabinski began smuggling Jews into empty cages. Another dozen "guests" hid inside the Zabinskis' villa, emerging after dark for dinner, socializing, and, during rare moments of calm, piano concerts. Jan, active in the Polish resistance, kept ammunition buried in the elephant enclosure and stashed explosives in the animal hospital. Meanwhile, Antonina kept her unusual household afloat, caring for both its human and its animal inhabitants—otters, a badger, hyena pups, lynxes.With her exuberant prose and exquisite sensitivity to the natural world, Diane Ackerman engages us viscerally in the lives of the zoo animals, their keepers, and their hidden visitors. She shows us how Antonina refused to give in to the penetrating fear of discovery, keeping alive an atmosphere of play and innocence even as Europe crumbled around her.
Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women
Harriet Reisen - 2009
Stories and details culled from Alcott’s journals; her equally rich letters to family, friends, publishers, and admiring readers; and the correspondence, journals, and recollections of her family, friends, and famous contemporaries provide the basis for this lively account of the author’s classic rags-to-riches tale.Alcott would become the equivalent of a multimillionaire in her lifetime based on the astounding sales of her books, leaving contemporaries like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Henry James in the dust. This biography explores Alcott’s life in the context of her works, all of which are to some extent autobiographical. A fresh, modern take on this remarkable and prolific writer, who secretly authored pulp fiction, harbored radical abolitionist views, and completed heroic service as a Civil War nurse, Louisa May Alcott is in the end also the story of how the all-time beloved American classic Little Women came to be. This revelatory portrait will present the popular author as she was and as she has never been seen before.
The Long Hitch Home
Jamie Maslin - 2015
One end of the globe to the other. 800 hitchhiking rides. 18 thousand miles. Four seasons. Three continents. 19 countries.How many rides does it take to hitch from Tasmania to London? Rogue wanderer Jamie Maslin decides to find out, propelling him into a high stakes adventure of a lifetime that sees him tackle searing desert, freezing mountains, tropical jungle and barren steppes on little more than a thumb and a prayer.The Long Hitch Home is a dynamic mix of heart-thumping adventure and well-researched social, cultural, and historical commentary on the score of countries Maslin encountered during his arduous, and at times life threatening, journey home.Whether writing about exotic backstreets of cities few of us will get to see, or unique wonders far off the beaten track, Jamie Maslin gives a thrilling and often hilarious account of what it is like to hit the road and live with intensity and rapture.
The Devil in Massachusetts: A Modern Enquiry Into the Salem Witch Trials
Marion L. Starkey - 1949
Starkey's sense of drama also vividly recreates the atmosphere of pity and terror that fostered the evil and suffering of this human tragedy.
One Small Candle: The Pilgrims' First Year in America
Thomas Fleming - 1964
We accompany them on their harrowing voyage across the Atlantic, through the rigors of the first New England winter and the threat of Indian attack as they desperately search for the home they eventually find at Plymouth. Once there, they must continue the struggle against brutal weather and disease.With masterly skill, New York Times bestselling historian and novelist Thomas Fleming gives us life-size portraits of the Pilgrim leaders. The Pilgrims' unique achievements – the Mayflower Compact, their tolerance of other faiths, the strict separation of church and state – are discussed in the context of the first year's anxieties and crises. Fleming writes admiringly of the younger men who emerged in the first year as the real leaders of the colony – William Bradford and Miles Standish. And he provides new insights into the deep humanity and tolerance of the Pilgrims' spiritual shepherd, Elder William Brewster.On the first Thanksgiving, already in the Pilgrim mind is a dawning consciousness that they are the forerunners of a great nation. It is implicit in William Bradford's words, "As one small candle may light a thousand, so the light kindled here has shone until many. . . ."