History of Scituate, Massachusetts, From Its First Settlement to 1831 by Samuel Deane, first published in 1831, is a rare manuscript, the original residing in one of the great libraries of the world. This book is a reproduction of that original, which has been scanned and cleaned by state-of-the-art publishing tools for better readability and enhanced appreciation. Restoration Editors' mission is to bring long out of print manuscripts back to life. Some smudges, annotations or unclear text may still exist, due to permanent damage to the original work. We believe the literary significance of the text justifies offering this reproduction, allowing a new generation to appreciate it.
In 1814, when their father leaves them in charge of the Scituate lighthouse outside of Boston, two teenaged sisters devise a clever way to avert an attack by a British warship patrolling the Massachusetts coast.
One hundred years ago, the people of Scituate proudly boasted not only of living in the coastal town but also of inhabiting the various villages--among them Greenbush, the West End, North Scituate, the Harbor, Scituate Center, Egypt, and Humarock--that comprised their community. Taming the four cliffs of Scituate, the townsfolk harnessed wind and wave to power their mills, scoured and scraped seafloor rocks to gather valuable moss, and outlasted some of the most powerful storms ever to hit the New England coast. Images of America: Scituate takes us on a tour of Dreamwold, "Copper King" Thomas W. Lawson's beautiful country estate, and through the villages to meet the endless list of interesting people who lived there, from Henry Turner Bailey, the U.S. delegate to six International Art Congresses, to Uncle John Brown, celebrated as "the Oldest Man in Scituate." Along the way, we patrol the beaches with the surfmen of the U.S. Life-Saving Service under the shining beacons of Scituate and Minot's Lights coming across the wrecks of the Columbia and the Etrusco.
Norwell was originally part of the maritime town Scituate, an area that boasted a thriving shipbuilding industry for over 200 years on the North River. In 1848, taxpayers from the south end of Scituate wanted more control over their finances and voted for secession. This area, originally known as South Scituate, was renamed Norwell in 1888 after the town's generous benefactor Henry Norwell. What remains of this quintessential South Shore community are many charming neighborhoods such as Ridge Hill, which has remnants of a commercial era long since passed, and Norwell Village, with a quaint small-village atmosphere that survives today.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, British colonists found the New World full of resources. With land readily available but workers in short supply, settlers developed coercive forms of labor—indentured servitude and chattel slavery—in order to produce staple export crops like rice, wheat, and tobacco. This brutal labor regime became common throughout most of the colonies. An important exception was New England, where settlers and their descendants did most work themselves. In Town Born, Barry Levy shows that New England's distinctive and far more egalitarian order was due neither to the colonists' peasant traditionalism nor to the region's inhospitable environment. Instead, New England's labor system and relative equality were every bit a consequence of its innovative system of governance, which placed nearly all land under the control of several hundred self-governing town meetings. As Levy shows, these town meetings were not simply sites of empty democratic rituals but were used to organize, force, and reconcile laborers, families, and entrepreneurs into profitable export economies. The town meetings protected the value of local labor by persistently excluding outsiders and privileging the town born. The town-centered political economy of New England created a large region in which labor earned respect, relative equity ruled, workers exercised political power despite doing the most arduous tasks, and the burdens of work were absorbed by citizens themselves. In a closely observed and well-researched narrative, Town Born reveals how this social order helped create the foundation for American society.
A surprising number of nationally recognized suffragist leaders spent summers in seaside Scituate, Massachusetts. This book creates a revealing portrait of their lives in what was arguably the nation's summer suffragist capital, using original research and previously unpublished records. It also offers a highly readable account of their personal and activist lives in Boston, New York, Washington, and elsewhere, fighting for women's right to vote, culminating in the adoption of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution in 1920. It is both local and national history, still relevant to our times, when the right to vote and the right to protest are under assault.
Vols. for 1889-1894, 1906-1912 issued with the Annual report of the Massachusetts Agricultural Experiment Station; vols. for 1895-1905 issued with the Annual report of the Hatch Environment Station of the Massachnusetts Agricultural College.
