Pie has been a delectable centerpiece of Yankee tables since Europeans first landed on New England's shores in the seventeenth century. With a satisfying variety of savory and sweet, author Robert Cox takes a bite out of the history of pie and pie-making in the region. From the crackling topmost crust to the bottom layer, explore the origin and evolution of popular ingredients like the Revolutionary roots of the Boston cream. One month at a time, celebrate the seasonal fixings that fill Ne...

The evolution of New England's famous culinary classic: chowder, in all its mouthwatering varieties—from the authors of Massachusetts Cranberry Culture.New England's culinary history is marked by a varying array of chowders. Early forms were thick and layered, but the adaptability of this beloved recipe has allowed for a multitude of tasty preparations to emerge. Thick or thin, brimming with fish or clams or corn, chowder springs up throughout the region i...

This historical look at New England's favorite fruit "ends up capturing the essence of the time period and place"—from the authors of A History of Chowder ( Edible South Shore ).New Englanders know that cranberries are not for holidays alone. For centuries, this tart fruit—a staple in the Yankee diet since before it was domesticated—has reigned over the cranberry heartland of Barnstable and Plymo...

A product of the "spiritual hothouse" of the Second Great Awakening, Spiritualism became the fastest growing religion in the nation during the 1850s, and one of the principal responses to the widespread perception that American society was descending into atomistic particularity.In Body and Soul, Robert Cox shows how Spiritualism sought to transform sympathy into social practice, arguing that each individual, living and dead, was poised within a nexus of affect, and through the act...

“The Origin of Others combines Toni Morrison’s accustomed eloquence with meaning for our times as citizens of the world.” —Nell Irvin Painter, New RepublicAmerica’s foremost novelist reflects on the themes that preoccupy her work and increasingly dominate national and world politics: race, fear, borders, the mass movement of peoples, the desire for belonging. What is race and why does it matter? What motivates the human tendency to construct Other...

In this captivating double life, Adam Gopnik searches for the men behind the icons of emancipation and evolution. Born by cosmic coincidence on the same day in 1809 and separated by an ocean, Lincoln and Darwin coauthored our sense of history and our understanding of man’s place in the world. Here Gopnik reveals these two men as they really were: family men and social climbers, ambitious manipulators and courageous adventurers, grieving parents and brilliant scholars. Above all we see them...

J ill Ker Conway, one of our most admired autobiographers--author of The Road from Coorain and True North--looks astutely and with feeling into the modern memoir: the forms and styles it assumes, and the strikingly different ways in which men and women respectively tend to understand and present their lives.In a narrative rich with evocations of memoirists over the centuries--from Jean-Jacques Rousseau and George Sand to W. E. B. Du Bois, Virginia Woolf, Frank McCourt and Katharine ...

In this collection of prose writings, one of America's foremost poets and feminist theorists reflects upon themes that have shaped her life and work.At issue are the politics of language; the uses of scholarship; and the topics of racism, history, and motherhood among others called forth by Rich as "part of the effort to define a female consciousness which is political, aesthetic, and erotic, and which refuses to be included or contained in the culture of passivity...

A fascinating and unusual chapter in American history about a religious community that held radical notions of equality, sex, and religion---only to transform itself, at the beginning of the twentieth century, into a successful silverware company and a model of buttoned-down corporate propriety.In the early nineteenth century, many Americans were looking for an alternative to the Puritanism that had been the foundation of the new country. Amid the fervor of the reli...

A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award, hailed in The Washington Post as "a work of enormous imagination and enterprise" and in The New York Times as "an important, original book," Southern Honor revolutionized our understanding of the antebellum South, revealing how Southern men adopted an ancient honor code that shaped their society from top to bottom. Using legal documents, letters, diaries, and newspaper columns, Wyatt-Brown offers fasc...

Ghosts of Futures Past guides readers through the uncanny world of nineteenth-century American spiritualism. More than an occult parlor game, this was a new religion, which channeled the voices of the dead, linked present with past, and conjured new worldly and otherworldly futures. Tracing the persistence of magic in an emergent culture of secularism, Molly McGarry brings a once marginalized practice to the center of American cultural history. Spiritualism provided an alchemical ...

A fascinating account of how the law determines or dismantles identity and personhoodAbused dogs, prisoners tortured in Guantánamo and supermax facilities, or slaves killed by the state—all are deprived of personhood through legal acts. Such deprivations have recurred throughout history, and the law sustains these terrors and banishments even as it upholds the civil order. Examining such troubling cases, The Law Is a White Dog tackles key societal question...