The Angel of Hadley

The Angel of Hadley

Author: Edward Lodi

Publisher:

Published: 2013-04-01

Total Pages: 144

ISBN-13: 9781934400302

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

On September 1, 1675, Indians attacked the small frontier settlement of Hadley, Massachusetts. King Philip¿s War had broken out a few weeks earlier, and the townspeople¿men, women, and children¿were assembled in the meeting house for a day of fasting and prayer. At the first sounds of attack¿war whoops, musket fire, and shouts from the sentries posted outside¿the people panicked. Soon the Indians would be upon them. Although the settlers were armed, they felt helpless, not knowing how best to defend themselves. Suddenly a stranger appeared in their midst. Of obvious military bearing, he quickly took command and organized the men into groups, some to defend the women and children, others to sally forth in a counter offensive. Leading the assault, he took the attackers by surprise and drove them off, and the town was saved. As quickly as he had appeared, the stranger vanished. Who was he? The townspeople, knowing that they owed to him their lives, believed that he was an emissary sent by God. And so was born the Legend of the Angel of Hadley. In reality the mysterious stranger was none other than William Goffe, the regicide¿one of the judges who condemned King Charles I to death in 1649. A hero of the English Civil Wars, and once one of the most powerful and respected men in all of England, for the past fifteen years he had been the object of the greatest manhunt in history.


Entangled Lives

Entangled Lives

Author: Marla Miller

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press

Published: 2019-12-17

Total Pages: 381

ISBN-13: 1421432749

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

An enlightening look at American women's work in the late eighteenth century. What was women's work truly like in late eighteenth-century America, and what does it tell us about the gendered social relations of labor in the early republic? In Entangled Lives, Marla R. Miller examines the lives of Anglo-, African, and Native American women in one rural New England community—Hadley, Massachusetts—during the town's slow transformation following the Revolutionary War. Peering into the homes, taverns, and farmyards of Hadley, Miller offers readers an intimate history of the working lives of these women and their vital role in the local economy. Miller, a longtime resident of Hadley, follows a handful of eighteenth-century women working in a variety of occupations: domestic service, cloth making, health and healing, and hospitality. She asks about the social openings and opportunities this work created—and the limitations it placed on ordinary lives. Her compelling stories about women's everyday work, grounded in the material culture, built environment, and landscapes of rural western Massachusetts, reveal the larger economic networks in which Hadley operated and the subtle shifts that accompanied the emergence of the middle class in that rural community. Ultimately, this book shows how work differentiated not only men and woman but also race and class as Miller follows young, mostly white women working in domestic service, African American women negotiating labor in enslavement and freedom, and women of the rural gentry acting as both producers and employers. Engagingly written and featuring fascinating characters, the book deftly takes us inside a society and shows us how it functions. Offering an intervention into larger conversations about local history, microhistory, and historical scholarship, Entangled Lives is a revealing journey through early America.