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A history of and collectors' guide to nineteenth-century glass manufacturing in South Boston
In 1852 Hannah Rebecca Crowell married sea captain William Burgess and set sail. Within three years, Rebecca Burgess had crossed the equator eleven times and learned to navigate a vessel. In 1856, 22-year-old Rebecca saved the ship Challenger as her husband lay dying from dysentery. The widow returned to her family’s home in Sandwich, Massachusetts, where she refused all marriage proposals and died wealthy in 1917. This is the way Burgess recorded her story in her prodigious journals and registers, which she donated to the local historical society upon her death, but there is no other evidence that this dramatic event occurred exactly this way. In The Captain’s Widow of Sandwich, Megan Taylor Shockley examines how Burgess constructed her own legend and how the town of Sandwich embraced that history as its own. Through careful analysis of myriad primary sources, Shockley also addresses how Burgess dealt with the conflicting gender roles of her life, reconciling her traditionally masculine adventures at sea and her independent lifestyle with the accepted ideals of the period’s “Victorian woman.”
James Jackson Jarves was the editor of an early weekly newspaper in the Hawaiian Islands, and also an art critic.
Edward Drummond Libbey was a glassmaker, industrialist, artist, innovator and art collector. Both practical and creative, he forever changed the glass industry with the automatic bottle-making machine and automatic sheet glass machine. This work examines the long career of Libbey, particularly his innovation of American flint cut glass, his contributions to the middle-class American table through affordable glassware, and his enormous art glass and painting collections, which eventually formed the basis for the Toledo Museum of Art's collection. Libbey single-handedly revolutionized glassmaking, a craft which had gone virtually unchanged for 2000 years.
There are thousands of museums in the USA, almost all of interest and almost all a source of learning but, after a while, they tend to blur together. How many stuffed buffalo are enough? How many re-created country stores? How many gun collections? This book lists and describes seventy-seven American museums (including a few non-museum attractions) that definitely stand out due to their uniqueness and the depth to which they document their subject. Many are small and only lightly promoted, some are in out-of-the-way places, some are quirky or even odd, but all are memorable and well worth a visit.