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Three hundred years of history follows you around today as you wander the streets of Essex, Centerbrook, and Ivoryton. Essex harbor is located on the Connecticut River six miles north of Long Island Sound, between Mystic Seaport and New Haven. It is a major stopping point for boaters in the Northeast who come from various ports to dock in the harbor, dine at the Griswold Inn, take in the maritime history at the Connecticut River Museum, or walk along the narrow streets to view the fine old houses in this New England community. Homes once owned by sea captains, shipbuilders, and captains of industry are a reminder of the area's glorious past. True, the old 1,200-foot Ropewalk, a mainstay of m...
Deep River and Ivoryton, two villages in the lower Connecticut River Valley, were dominated for more than a century by "white gold"-ivory. The growth of the piano industry led to a new use for this exotic and long-treasured substance and, suddenly, the two villages became tied to Zanzibar, the most important exporting place for the tusks of African elephants. With more than two hundred exceptional photographs and narrative, Deep River and Ivoryton tells the story of how ivory shaped the economy and culture of these villages. Two companies, Pratt, Read & Company and the Comstock, Cheney & Company, employed thousands of people in satisfying the demand for new pianos. Probably more than ninety percent of the ivory processed in this country was handled in Deep River and Ivoryton. The demand for new instruments slowed with the invention of the radio, followed by the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the flow of material stopped altogether in the 1950s, when the use of ivory in the United States was banned.
Twenty-five archaeologists each tell an intimate story of their experience and entanglement with an evocative artifact.
“[A] tour de force examination of the history of ivory . . . and the demise of the elephant and human decency in the process of this unholy quest.” —The Huffington Post Praised for the nuance and sensitivity with which it approaches one of the most fraught conservation issues we face today, John Frederick Walker’s Ivory’s Ghosts tells the astonishing story of the power of ivory through the ages, and its impact on elephants. Long before gold and gemstones held allure, ivory came to be prized in every culture of the world—from ancient Egypt to nineteenth-century America to modern Japan—for its beauty, rarity, and ability to be finely carved. But the beauty came at an unfathomable...
THE STORY: Takes place in the Greenwich Village apartment of Sam Harway, artist, and Robbie Winters, newspaper reporter. Robbie's sister, Sally, wide-eyed and fresh from the farm, unexpectedly arrives in the big city looking for a place to stay,
"Shipbuilding and shipping have always been key elements in the life of Essex. Since the seventeenth century, the men and women of lower Connecticut River Valley sustained maritime traditions that spanned the globe in splendid wooden sailing vessels. Noted historians ... detail one village's important role in American maritime history."--Back cover
An examination of director Todd Haynes and his Bob Dylan biopic. As the first and only Bob Dylan “biopic,” I’m Not There caused a stir when released in 2007. Offering a surreal retelling of moments from Dylan’s life and career, the film is perhaps best known for its distinctive approach to casting, including Cate Blanchett and Marcus Carl Franklin, a Black child actor, as versions of Dylan though none of the characters bear his name. Greenlit by Bob Dylan himself, the film uses Dylan’s music as a score, a triumph for famed queer filmmaker Todd Haynes after encountering issues with copyright in previous projects. Noah Tsika eloquently characterizes all the ways that Dylan and Haynes...
This monograph is a case study of an outbreak of severe local storms that produced several tornadoes and extensive large hail in Oklahoma on 26 May 1963. Several authors have combined to describe the organization, structure, and evolution of these storms from a number of points of view. The storms are analyzed on four different size scales: (1) as products of their large-scale environment, (2) as members of a mesoscale system or family unit, (3) as individual evolving cells, and (4) as tornado and hail factories, with the emphasis on the tornadoes and the hailstones themselves. Data are obtained from conventional synoptic and mesosynoptic networks, visual and photographic observations, surface weather surveys, weather radars, sferics detectors, balloon tracks, radioactivity measurements in precipitation, and hailstone thin sections. Simple models are presented describing the airflow, structure and life cycle of individual severe local storms. (Author)
While Middlesex County is one of the most historic communities in the nation, some of its past is little known. Researchers found dinosaur tracks in Middlefield that date back 200 million years. The author of Dr. Dolittle, Hugh Lofting, lived in Killingworth, and a young Dr. Seuss spent summers in Clinton. Constance Baker Motley, the first female African American federal judge, resided in Chester. A Portland lake has water levels that fluctuate for no apparent reason. An Essex blacksmith shop was America's oldest continuously run family business. Local authors Robert and Kathleen Hubbard reveal these and many other unforgettable stories.
A startling and superbly researched book demythologizing the North’s role in American slavery “The hardest question is what to do when human rights give way to profits. . . . Complicity is a story of the skeletons that remain in this nation’s closet.”—San Francisco Chronicle The North’s profit from—indeed, dependence on—slavery has mostly been a shameful and well-kept secret . . . until now. Complicity reveals the cruel truth about the lucrative Triangle Trade of molasses, rum, and slaves that linked the North to the West Indies and Africa. It also discloses the reality of Northern empires built on tainted profits—run, in some cases, by abolitionists—and exposes the thousand-acre plantations that existed in towns such as Salem, Connecticut. Here, too, are eye-opening accounts of the individuals who profited directly from slavery far from the Mason-Dixon line. Culled from long-ignored documents and reports—and bolstered by rarely seen photos, publications, maps, and period drawings—Complicity is a fascinating and sobering work that actually does what so many books pretend to do: shed light on America’s past.