Beneath the churning surface of Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary rest the bones of shipwrecks and sailors alike. Massachusetts' ports connected its citizens to the world, and the number of merchant and fishing vessels grew alongside the nation's development. Hundreds of ships sank on the trade routes and fishing grounds between Cape Cod and Cape Ann. Their stories are waiting to be uncovered--from the ill-fated steamship Portland to collided schooners Frank A. Palmer and Louise B....

A radical manifesto for how to deal with climate breakdownThe environment is collapsing at a rapid rate, and in increasingly unpredictable ways. Everyone knows that this is happening, and yet the only politics that is emerging to tackle it are coming from the increasingly nativist far-right. How should the left respond?In Planet on Fire, two rising stars of the British left lay down a set of proposals for a fundamental re-shaping of the global econ...

Around noon on January 15, 1919, a group of firefighters was playing cards in Boston's North End when they heard a tremendous crash. It was like roaring surf, one of them said later. Like a runaway two-horse team smashing through a fence, said another. A third firefighter jumped up from his chair to look out a window-"Oh my God!" he shouted to the other men, "Run!"A 50-foot-tall steel tank filled with 2.3 million gallons of molasses had just collapsed on Boston's waterfront, disgor...

In the midst of the Blizzard of 1978, the tanker Global Hope floundered on the shoals in Salem Sound off the Massachusetts coast. The Coast Guard heard the Mayday calls and immediately dispatched a patrol boat. Within an hour, the Coast Guard boat was in as much trouble as the tanker, having lost its radar, depth finder, and engine power in horrendous seas. Pilot boat Captain Frank Quirk was monitoring the Coast Guard's efforts by radio, and when he heard that the patrol boat was ...

The history of Cape Cod including the creation of the iconic New England landmark, The Cape Cod Canal. The cradle of New England's shipping doubled as its casket, earning the sailing route around Cape Cod the nickname of graveyard of the Atlantic. J. North Conway plunges into the character of Cape Cod, from its discovery to its chowder, and of the man who managed to cut a path through it.

The world's one-and-only PEZ historian dispenses fun facts on the candy's evolution from smoking substitute to childhood treat to pop culture collectible.PEZ is an American classic and a staple of many childhood memories. Yet it originated in Austria, where PEZ began in 1927 as compressed peppermint tablets marketed as an alternative to smoking. Upon arrival in the United States in 1952, PEZ quickly took a new direction, adding fruit flavors and three-dimensional c...

The true story of a mysterious shipwreck during the Klondike gold rush.In early February 1898, witnesses reported a giant orange fireball reflected in the glacial waters of Alaska's Lynn Canal. At the height of Klondike gold fever, the Clara Nevada disappeared into an epic storm, taking passengers and priceless cargo with her.Was the explosion an accident—or a robbery gone wrong? Did Captain C.H. Lewis make off with $165,000—$13.6 million in today'...

Considered one of the city's most notorious industrial slums in the 1940s and 1950s, Brownstone Brooklyn by the 1980s had become a post-industrial landscape of hip bars, yoga studios, and beautifully renovated, wildly expensive townhouses. In The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn, Suleiman Osman offers a groundbreaking history of this unexpected transformation. Challenging the conventional wisdom that New York City's renaissance started in the 1990s, Osman locates the origins of ge...

A first-hand account and fascinating new details of the 1952 rescue of the SS Pendleton, the true story behind the film The Finest Hours.On February 18, 1952, off the coast of Cape Cod, a fierce nor'easter snapped in half two 503-foot oil tankers, the Pendleton and the Fort Mercer. Human grace and grit, leadership and endurance prevail as Theresa Mitchell Barbo and Captain W. Russell Webster (Ret.) recount the historic, heroic res...

Through firsthand accounts, interviews with survivors and a gripping collection of vintage photographs, author Michael Skidgell attempts to make sense of one of Hartford's worst tragedies. Almost 7,000 fans eagerly packed into the Ringling Brothers big top on July 6, 1944. With a single careless act, an afternoon at the "Greatest Show on Earth" quickly became one of terror and tragedy as the paraffin-coated circus tent caught fire. Panicked crowds rushed for the few exits, but in minutes, ...

In a time when racing boats are mass-produced from synthetic materials, a dying breed of craftsman continues to build wooden sailboats of astonishing beauty. Boatbuilding is an ancient art, and Joel White was a master. Son of the legendary writer E.B. White, he was raised around boats and his designs were as sublime and graceful as his father's prose. At a boatyard in Maine, White and his closely knit team of builders brought scores of his creations from blueprints into the ocean.I...

Deep Sea Decisions introduces the Evergreen Group, the owners of the largest container ships ever built, and details their recent high-value losses jumping off every headline. Why? Who is really to blame for these incidents? And why are the officers and crew the first ones, often the only ones, blamed? An updated 2022 version of the highly acclaimed Deep Sea Dominoes, this new book adds further evidence of responsibility to those previously told historica...