Northfield


Book Description

Northfields mountains, abundant forests, and rich agricultural fields along the Connecticut River sustained native inhabitants for centuries before the English settled in the area known as Squakheag in 1713. Incorporated in 1723, Northfield became a crossroads for travel and commerce, supporting ferries, taverns, mills, and other farm-related businesses. Elegant Federal-style homes crafted in the 1800s by the Stearns brothers still line the iconic Main Street. Northfield native Dwight L. Moody, a famous evangelist, founded area schools and summer conferences. In the late 19th century, the quiet farming town became heaven on earth to Moodys followers, who arrived by the hundreds each summer seeking spiritual renewal and relief from the cities. The railroad brought visitors to the first American youth hostel and to the popular Northfield Inn and Chateau, where many permanent residents found employment. Around Northfield, Queen Annestyle homes provided lodging for boarders, while tearooms, milliners, liveries, and grocers served visitors. Today, Northfields vitality and spirit endures, forged by education, hard work, civic engagement, and perseverance.










King Philip's War: The History and Legacy of America's Forgotten Conflict


Book Description

King Philip's War--one of America's first and costliest wars--began in 1675 as an Indian raid on several farms in Plymouth Colony, but quickly escalated into a full-scale war engulfing all of southern New England. At once an in-depth history of this pivotal war and a guide to the historical sites where the ambushes, raids, and battles took place, King Philip's War expands our understanding of American history and provides insight into the nature of colonial and ethnic wars in general. Through a careful reconstruction of events, first-person accounts, period illustrations, and maps, and by providing information on the exact locations of more than fifty battles, King Philip's War is useful as well as informative. Students of history, colonial war buffs, those interested in Native American history, and anyone who is curious about how this war affected a particular New England town, will find important insights into one of the most seminal events to shape the American mind and continent.




The Sea Captain's Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century


Book Description

A finalist for the Lincoln Prize, The Sea Captain's Wife "comes surprisingly, and movingly, alive" (Tina Jordan, Entertainment Weekly). Award-winning historian Martha Hodes brings us into the extraordinary world of Eunice Connolly. Born white and poor in New England, Eunice moved from countryside to factory city, worked in the mills, then followed her husband to the Deep South. When the Civil War came, Eunice's brothers joined the Union army while her husband fought and died for the Confederacy. Back in New England, a widow and the mother of two, Eunice barely got by as a washerwoman, struggling with crushing depression. Four years later, she fell in love with a black sea captain, married him, and moved to his home in the West Indies. Following every lead in a collection of 500 family letters, Hodes traced Eunice's footsteps and met descendants along the way. This story of misfortune and defiance takes up grand themes of American history—opportunity and racism, war and freedom—and illuminates the lives of ordinary people in the past. A Library Journal Best Book of the Year and a selection of the Book of the Month Club, Literary Guild, and Quality Paperback Book Club.




Memory Lands


Book Description

Noted historian Christine DeLucia offers a major reconsideration of the violent seventeenth-century conflict in northeastern America known as King Philip’s War, providing an alternative to Pilgrim-centric narratives that have conventionally dominated the histories of colonial New England. DeLucia grounds her study of one of the most devastating conflicts between Native Americans and European settlers in early America in five specific places that were directly affected by the crisis, spanning the Northeast as well as the Atlantic world. She examines the war’s effects on the everyday lives and collective mentalities of the region’s diverse Native and Euro-American communities over the course of several centuries, focusing on persistent struggles over land and water, sovereignty, resistance, cultural memory, and intercultural interactions. An enlightening work that draws from oral traditions, archival traces, material and visual culture, archaeology, literature, and environmental studies, this study reassesses the nature and enduring legacies of a watershed historical event.