New Hampshire Books

We vacationed near the town of Sandwich, NH and I wanted to find a book that told me a little bit about the history of this quaint New England town. This books covers a large slice of history around this area as well as the history of the town itself. Great book with lots of good reading. It comes well reccommended!

Sarah Parker Rice Goodwin began writing her memiors when she turned 70 years old. This book sticks to Sarah telling things in her own words, or those of others of her time to describe life, it's issues, and life style during the period from about 1820- until close to her death in 1896. Ms. Kelly provides the background about other characters, traditions and practices of the time for clarification. The research is very detailed and thorough. It gives a good picture of life during that time period and the impact of events, such as the civil war on New England families. Sarah was an accomplished, intelligent woman who could hold her own with the leaders of her day. Her story provides insight and life to her time period.

I have loved this book for years and am surprised no one has reviewed it yet. It's an excellent analysis of toxic contamination in the U.S., Italy, and Japan. I use the opening and closing chapters regularly to teach undergraduates about patterns of "privatizing" and "publicizing" that frequently occur surrounding toxic disasters, as well as how "nonissues" can develop into "public issues" and then into "political issues." Having worked with and lived as an activist in communities with toxic dumps, Reich's analysis is telling for a wide range of pollution controversies well beyond the isolated one-time disaster. I'd highly recommend this book to anyone interested in pollution, social movements, and institutional power.

This wonderful book features historic Shaker style crafts and old-style Shaker recipes for both adults and children. Some of the crafts and recipes require intermediate skills or better so the book is really for those 9 years old and up.

This is one of my favorite books in my Shaker collection. This book brings the personalities back to life for me. As a Shaker enthusiast, I enjoy seeing the picture of the people written about in other works. The author has done a good job selecting photographs that best illustrate the life and work of a great people.

Maybe the Shakerês visions of the "spiritual world" shaped Sister Sarleês perception of the "natural world" and therefore influenced her nice, simple, stylized drawings. On stressing the straight stalks and the symmetry of every plant she captures the essence of each species. I like the a little bit naive-looking illustrations very much because of their honesty and purity. The plants are well-arranged on every page, with a certain economy of layout, which fits into the Shaker-philosophy. I think in some way Sister Helenaês spirit lives on in these prettily-drawn illustrations that can please both- flower lovers and botanists.

In this interesting book, Lenney looks at six man-made features of the New England landscape (placenames, boundaries, townplans, roads, houses, and gravestones) and attempts to "map" them while tracing their trends. Some of his discoveries are most intriguing: the "Great-Big Line" that can be drawn east-west across central Maine, north of which placenames employ the term Big, while south of the line Great is the overwhelming choice is one example; another is the fact that many early boundary lines run slightly NW-SE rather than straight N-S because the magnetic pole changes over time and during the 1600s magnetic north was farther NW than it is today. The shear number of ways Lenney details variants as he "seeks" New England landscape characteristics is truly amazing: the number of townplans discussed, for instance, is over a dozen and the number of house types is even higher (over 17). The book is simply loaded with fascinating information that will make anyone's next excursion through New England more worthwhile than ever - even if it's just via a book of detailed maps while sitting in an easy chair. Lenney is an engaging writer as well. The only fault I can find with the book is its total lack of photographs. Other than that, it's worth "seeking" out.

From Journal of American History, March 2008

Singing for Freedom: The Hutchinson Family Singers and the Nineteenth-Century Culture of Reform. By Scott Gac. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. xiv, 312 pp. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-300-11198-9.)

Scott Gac's Singing for Freedom is a well-crafted study of one of the greatest musical acts in American history. The book provides a meticulous account of the rise and fall of the Hutchinson family singers, their role in antebellum reforms, and their creation of commercially viable protest music. The book would be a smashing success if it had accomplished only this, but it does so much more. It also provides a fresh look at the market revolution of the decades before the Civil War, sheds new light on the spread of the antislavery movement, and explains the emergence of a new and enduring form of protest.

Gac is a gifted narrator. The book transports the reader to the time and place of Hutchinson performances. His accounts of the family's early performances in Boston, Albany, and New York City are particularly vivid, providing a wonderful feel for the cultural vibrancy of the 1840s. Singing for Freedom beautifully captures the dynamic relationship between city and country, and the role of popular entertainment in an emerging consumer culture. Gac explains well the market space that the Hutchinson singers carved out: a space bounded on one side by morally suspect blackface minstrelsy and on the other by noncommercial church music. The key to holding this space was the simultaneously pious and provocative reform messages of the family's music. Going to hear the "Tribe of Jessie" was an exciting event that members of a religious middle class, uncomfortable with city entertainments, could genuinely justify as an act of moral reform.

Gac's book tells a paradoxical story of how the family's identification with the wildly controversial cause of immediate abolitionism was instrumental to the act's commercial success, and how the immense popularity of their music worked to bridge the divide between hostile antislavery factions. His careful chronicle of the Hutchinsons' rising star in the early 1840s illuminates how antislavery sentiments grew stronger in the North even as the organizational coherence of the abolitionist movement fell apart. Through it all, Gac reveals something very important about the ability of protest songs to resonate well beyond their social movement source. Singing for Freedom provides the beginning of a history of the invention of a new technology in American protest.

The career of Hutchinson family singers was not all triumphant. There were painful contradictions throughout. These temperance advocates came from a family farm that featured hops as its most profitable crop. They sang that they came from the mountains of the Granite State but did not actually visit the White Mountains until well after their initial success. They were staunch abolitionists but serenaded Henry Clay. All the members of the group struggled to balance commercial success with authenticity as reformers and performers. The disappointing end to the group's career mirrored the fate of the egalitarian dreams of the early immediate abolitionists.

This excellent book is a must read for historians of antebellum America, antislavery, temperance, and popular music. It should also be read by anyone interested in the relationship between music and social movements and the history of the American protest song.

Michael P. Young
University of Texas
Austin, Texas

This book is fantastic and fun to read. B.J lives in New York but a fresh air kid program moves him to South Bridgeton, New Hampshire,he learns the different life out in the country. This is agreat book by Betty Miles.

Sisters of Fortune is a biography of a family during the Civil War era. It reads like a novel. Three sisters who live in a small town in New Hampshire, left by their fortune-seeking father, try to maintain their upper-middle class life style on the little money he sends them while they fall in and out of love, have their hearts broken, and finally marry. The sisters write wonderful letters to their father telling him of their loves, travels, parties, friends, relations, neighbors, domestic affairs, money worries, etc. and begging him to come home. When the eldest daughter Lizzie marries and moves to New York, the younger daughters, Annie and Charlotte spend winters with her there and launch themselves in a round of parties and social events. Since their father had been a Congressman, they know and write about many of the famous men of the day--for example, Daniel Webster was a family friend. They write about the the slavery debates, the coming of the Civil War, and the growth of New York City as well as their own private affairs. A touching and charming book.