massachusetts

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1st, 1896, Book: Good, Hardcover, green cloth stamped in black with gilt lettering on spine. Top edge gilt. 225 pages. A history of old Nantucket before the island was discovered by "the summer boarders", as the author explains in his Preface. Gutter partially cracked at title page, owner's small embossed stamp on the front fly leaf. Otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Amherst MA, University of Massachusetts Press, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 334 pages, b&w illustrations. Relying on original historical materials, an illustrated biography traces the lives of an influential pair of American socialists--he a wealthy journalist-activist, she an aspiring novelist. When they fell in love amid the tumult of the 1905 Russian revolution, they believed they were destiny's match: William English Walling, a wealthy American journalist-activist from the Midwest, an Anna Strunsky, an aspiring novelist from San Francisco. Vowing to dedicate themselves to socialist ideals, they soon became celebrities who moved in an elite circle of writers, journalist, and reformers. ultimately, both their marriage and their political commitment faltered, but not before they had participated in some of the most urgent social causes of their day. Drawing on archival sources and family materials, James Boylan creates engaging portraits of two striking figures. He reveals the details of Strunsky's intesnse involvement with Jack London and their troubled literary collaboration. He describes the creation of Walling's "revolutionary news bureau" in Russia under scrutiny of the czarist police, and Strunsky's harrowing journey to report on a pogrom. He also recounts the couple's dash to cover a race riot in Illinois, Walling's pivotal role in creating the NAACP and the disasterous schism between Strunksky's pacifism and Walling's bellicosity during World War I. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Gloucester MA, Rocky Neck Art Colony, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 160 pages illustrated throughout with over 130 plates in color. Light edgewear to dust jacket. Clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 3rd pr., 1975, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 231 pages. Frontispiece facsimile manuscript page showing names of the accused at Salem. The stark immediacy of what happened in 1692 has obscured the complex web of human passion, individual and organized, which had been growing for more than a generation before the witch trials. Salem Possessed explores the lives of the men and women who helped spin that web and who in the end found themselves entangled in it. From rich and varied sources-many previously neglected or unknown-Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum give us a picture of the events of 1692 more intricate and more fascinating than any other in the already massive literature on Salem. Name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Gardiner ME, Tilbury House, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 366 pages. Illustrated with vintage photographs throughout. A history of the final decades of American square-rigged sail. First-hand accounts of voyages made by three well-born young men from Massachusetts; two were sons of whaling families and a third sailed the Pacific. Original brown cloth publisher's covers with silver spine lettering. Published in conjunction with Martha's Vineyard Historical Society and the New Bedford Whaling Museum. Clean copy.

Softcover. Sheffield MA, W.D. French, 1st, 1904, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 52 pages, stapled brown wrappers. The booklet provides a comprehensive overview of the town of Sheffield, located in the Berkshires region of Massachusetts. It covers the town's early history, including its founding and development, as well as its prominent citizens, industries, and landmarks. The publication also includes detailed descriptions of Sheffield's natural beauty, including its picturesque mountains, rivers, and forests. Additionally, the book contains numerous illustrations and photographs that help to bring the town's history to life. Mild fade to part of cover, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Boston, Gambit , 1st, 1973, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a worn, chipped dust jacket. Emissar of Charles the First, second governor of Massachusetts, pillar of the Protectorate, and victim of Charles the Second, atypical Puritan and passionate lover, Sir Harry Vane was a man of peace who initiated genocide in the New World and found martyrdom in the Old. His experience reaches from Indian wigwam to royal palace. This is an unparalleled picture of a formative age which is with us yet. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Between 1908 and 1917, the American photographer and sociologist Lewis Hine (1874-1940) took some of the most memorable pictures of child workers ever made. Traveling around the United States while working for the National Child Labor Committee, he photographed children in textile mills, coal mines, and factories from Vermont and Massachusetts to Georgia, Tennessee, and Missouri. Using his camera as a tool of social activism, Hine had a major influence on the development of documentary photography. But many of his pictures transcend their original purpose. Concentrating on these photographs, Alexander Nemerov reveals the special eeriness of Hine's beautiful and disturbing work as never before. Richly illustrated, the book also includes arresting contemporary photographs by Jason Francisco of the places Hine documented. Clean copy.

Softcover. Indianapolis, Liberty Fund, reprint, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 325 pages. John Adams and Benjamin Rush were two remarkably different men who shared a devotion to liberty. Their dialogues on the implications of fame for their generation prove remarkably timely--even for the twenty-first century. Adams and Rush championed very different views on the nature of the American Revolution and of the republic established with the United States Constitution; yet they shared one of the most important correspondences of their time. John Adams and Benjamin Rush met in 1774 as members of the Continental Congress--Adams from Massachusetts, Rush from Pennsylvania. In 1805, after Adams was defeated in his quest of a second term as the new republic's second President, the two men self-consciously commenced an exchange of letters. Their recurring subject was fame. This emphasis on fame was crucial, Adams and Rush believed, because on the fame attached to individual leaders of the Revolutionary generation would depend the view of the Revolution and of the Constitution and republican government that would be embraced by generations to come, including our own. The Liberty Fund edition of The Spur of Fame reproduces a text originally published by the Huntington Library.

Hardcover. NY, Viking, 1st, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 212 pages. A chronicle of Jerome's year spent building a stone wall on his property in the Massachusetts Berkshires - a task which leaves his mind "as free as a colt turned out to pasture" as he muses on the "grace and beauty found within nature and the possibilities inherent in stillness." Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Doubleday, 1st, 1967, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn, price-clipped dust jacket. Illustrated with drawings by Ray Cruz. Clean.

Hardcover. NY, VIking, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 261 pages, illustrations. Philip Mould takes a wonderfully interesting look at how art restoration works. But, in looking at restoration of existing paintings, he also delves into how he, as a gallery owner, along with his team, find work that has remained under-valued or unvalued for centuries. And then how that piece, now restored by Mould's experts, ventures back into the art world in renewed glory. Mould takes five or so examples of "found" paintings - one from his "Antique Roadshow" - and writes how instinct and education about a painter, his other work, the painting's subject's history, and other "intangables' go into Mould and his staff taking on an often dirty and undistinguished painting on the chance that the painting is "the real thing" - a real Rembrandt, a real Homer Winslow, etc. Probably the most interesting story was that of a Norman Rockwell painting on display at the Rockwell Museum in Massachusetts that...wasn't. Wasn't the "real" Rockwell painting, but rather one done by a disciple of Rockwell, who copied the original for reasons sort of murky, and donated to the museum. The "real" Rockwell was found by the copier's sons after his death and turned over to the museum. Clean copy.

Softcover. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 155 pages. Thomas Dennis emigrated to America from England in 1663, settling in Ipswich, a Massachusetts village a long day's sail north of Boston. He had apprenticed in joinery, the most common method of making furniture in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Britain, and he became Ipswich's second joiner, setting up shop in the heart of the village. During his lifetime, Dennis won wide renown as an artisan. Today, connoisseurs judge his elaborately carved furniture as among the best produced in seventeenth-century America. Robert Tarule, historian and accomplished craftsman, brilliantly recreates Dennis's world in recounting how he created a single oak chest. Writing as a woodworker himself, Tarule vividly portrays Dennis walking through the woods looking for the right trees; sawing and splitting the wood on site; and working in his shop on the chest-planing, joining, and carving. Dennis inherited a knowledge of wood and woodworking that dated back centuries before he was born, and Tarule traces this tradition from Old World to New. He also depicts the natural and social landscape in which Dennis operated, from the sights, sounds, and smells of colonial Ipswich and its surrounding countryside to the laws that governed his use of trees and his network of personal and professional relationships. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, St. Martin's Press, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. A reminder of the time when America fell in love with a tall, lanky, curly-haired pitcher for the Detroit Tigers. For a time in the 1970s, the country was in thrall to Mark Fidrych, who came to be known as "The Bird" for his resemblance to Big Bird. Fidrych emerged in the summer of 1976 and became an unlikely but legitimate phenomenon. Wilson tells the Bird's story in this biography of the Massachusetts native whose antics included tending to his own pitching mound during games and allegedly talking to the baseball. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Hastings House, 1st, 1970, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, lightly worn dust jacket, 191 pages, b&w illustrations. An unsparing account of the famous massacre of March 5, 1770, when a squad of British soldiers, called out to protect a sentry from a Boston mob, fired on civilians, killing 4, fatally wounding a fifth, and injuring 6 others. Was it a massacre, as Boston called it, or "the first battle of the American Revolution," as some writers styled it, or merely a street brawl, as the testimonies of witnesses seem to indicate? Whatever its character, it had great influence in consolidating colonial opposition to the British Government. This is the story of one of the most famous and controversial murder trials in American history, in which John Adams and Josiah Quince, Jr., confirmed patriots, toiled to get the soldiers acquitted to save Boston from retaliation, against the violent opposition of Samuel Adams, who wanted the soldiers convicted as murderers. Name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. The colonists who settled the backcountry in eighteenth-century New England were recruited from the social fringe, people who were desperate for land, autonomy, and respectability and who were willing to make a hard living in a rugged environment. Mark Williams' microhistorical approach gives voice to the settlers, proprietors, and officials of the small colonial settlements that became Granby, Connecticut, and Ashfield, Massachusetts. These people-often disrespectful, disorderly, presumptuous, insistent, and defiant-were drawn to the ideology of the Revolution in the 1760s and 1770s that stressed equality, independence, and property rights. The backcountry settlers pushed the emerging nation's political culture in a more radical direction than many of their leaders or the Founding Fathers preferred and helped put a democratic imprint on the new nation. This accessibly written book will resonate with all those interested in the social and political relationships of early America.

Hardcover. Westholme Publishing, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 374 pages, b&w illustrations. Bright, clean. INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on title page. "Early in the afternoon of May 22, 1856, ardent pro-slavery Congressman Preston S. Brooks of South Carolina strode into the United States Senate Chamber in Washington, D.C., and began beating renowned anti-slavery Senator Charles Sumner with a cane until it splintered and the helpless Massachusetts senator lay unconscious and covered in blood. One of the most shocking and provocative events in American history, the caning convinced each side that the gulf between them was unbridgeable and that they could no longer discuss their vast differences of opinion regarding slavery on any reasonable level."

Hardcover. Chapel Hill NC, University of North Carolina Press, 1st, 1976, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 324 pages, b&w illustrations. Published for the Williamsburg, VA Institute of Early American History & Culture. Instead of recounting, in detail, the public events of John Adams's extraordinary career, Peter Shaw views as a whole Adams's character, thought, and acts, personalizing for the reader the most remote of our Founding Fathers. This compact but comprehensive biography brilliantly portrays the poignant revelations of John Adams's inner life implicit in the recently released Adams family manuscripts. The formal side of Adams is reconciled with his remarkably colorful private life by the author's penetrating grasp of the whole man. Adams's behavior appears less eccentric when viewed in the context of its origin in the village life of eighteenth~century Massachusetts; and his politics and ideas appear less abstractly motivated when viewed in the light of the evolution of his character. Name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Softcover. Carbondale IL, Southern Illinois University Press , 1st, 1970, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, dark gray covers with some fading. 639 pages. A detailed documentary on the American Colonial Society, discussing culture, politics, religion, and much more. David Potter and Gordon L. Thomas have selected representative and important speeches and exhortations delivered by famous Americans from the beginning of the Massachusetts Bay Colony to the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The selections are arranged in five categories--those dealing with academic, legal, occasional, political, and religious matters. They are drawn from every stratum of colonial activity--from the classrooms, clerical studies, town meetings, provincial assemblies, and the bar. Great names abound in these pages, but, frequently, expounders of great ideas found here are unremembered figures whose works cannot be found easily elsewhere. The editors have carried out careful research on each speech to assure the authenticity of the text. They have added, for each selection, a note on the speaker and on the place where he delivered his address. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Amherst MA, University of Massachusetts Press, 1st US, 1976, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright blue dust jacket, 143 pages. Edited by P. T. Geach and A. J. P. Kenny. Name on front fly leaf, light pencil notations to 20 pages.

Hardcover. Philadelphia, W.A. Henry Press, 3rd Ed., 1926, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial gray cloth stamped in black and white. 330 pages, top edge gilt. frontis., b/w plates, text illustrations appendix, index. A highly regarded social history of Nantucket treats the purchase and settlement of the island, the early proprietors, and various events in Nantucket history, such as Nantucket's role in the Revolution. The balance of the work consists of histories of some thirty founding families. Genealogists should also consult the appendices for a list of Quakers who visited Nantucket between 1664 and 1847. Small embossed stamp on front fly leaf, otherwise a bright, clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Alfred A Knopf, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. The tale of a 17th-Century American girl who ends up an emperor's mistress in India. Hannah Easton, born in 1670 in the forests of Massachusetts, at age 15 moves to Salem with adoptive parents after her father dies of a bee sting and her mother - during the French and Indian War-runs off with a lover from the Nipmuc tribe. Having witnessed scalpings and worse, and harboring the terrible secret of her mother's having gone over to the ``barbarians,'' Hannah is a deeper well than most young girls, suffering trance-like illnesses but also excelling at needlework - including the surgical variety, learned in the war. Her oddnesses, though, are no impediment to marriage with the dashing adventurer Gabriel Legge, who takes her first to England, then to India, where Gabriel joins the East India Company before going independent as a pirate - a calling that will bring him fame and wealth, but also, at last, death. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Boston, Rockwell & Churchill, 1st, 1894, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, dark olive-green cloth with gilt lettering, 415 pages. Preface by William Whitmore. Vol. I ONLY. Name on front fly leaf, rear cover with light soil, otherwise internally clean.

Hardcover. Boston, Little, Brown and Company, 1st, 1976, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. $8.95 on front flap; Higgins 5th novel; minor shelf rubbing at extremities of dust jacket. Deke Hunter is a Massachusetts State Police plainclothesman. He proves that through hard work, bumbling and pure luck, he can sometimes, surprisingly, produce justice. Clean copy.