Nathaniel Bowditch was born in Salem, Massachusets in 1773. He is frequently credited with being the father of modern maritime navigation. A brilliant and largely self-taught mathematician, Bowditch became interested in celestial navigation while at sea. His book American Practical Navigator has been so influential since its first publication in 1802 and through its many revisions that mariners refer to it simply as "Bowditch." On the Sunday after Nathaniel Bowditch died in 1838, his son Nathaniel Ingersoll Bowditch memorialized his father's life and accomplishments to students at a chapel built especially for poor children in Boston. In 1841, these recollections were published in this memoir.
A famous survey of premarital courting customs in early America. This book was banned in Boston in 1871
On the fiftieth anniversary of the defense of Fort Sumter, author Eba Anderson Lawton, Major Anderson's daughter, recounts the story of her father's command of Fort Sumter at the start of the Civil War. Kentucky-born Major Robert Anderson was the commanding officer of the Union Army troops in Charleston, South Carolina when the state became the first to secede from the Union in 1860. Remaining loyal to the Union and without orders from Washington, Anderson surreptitiously moved his men from the hard-to-defend Fort Moultrie to the more substantial Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.Lawton recounts how the men spent months in the fort under siege, with no reinforcements and no provisions. On April 12, 1861, at the command of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, Confederate artillery fired on Fort Sumter, marking the beginning of the Civil War. Ten thousand rebel forces lined up against the sixty Union troops. On April 14, after a valiant fight that lasted 34 hours, Anderson accepted terms of evacuation and left with his men, saluting, lowering, and removing the American flag. He sailed for New York City, where he was met with great appreciation for the stand he had taken.Major Anderson returned to Charleston on April 14, 1865, where he raised over the ruins of Fort Sumter the flag he had lowered four years earlier. That same night, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in Washington, D.C.
The first book written and printed in the New World, The Bay Psalm Book holds a unique place in our cultural and religious history. Richard Mather and a group of his fellow New England clergy transcribed biblical psalms into metered verse. In 1640, just 20 years after the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock, they printed 1700 copies in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Originals of this edition are extremely rare-only ten are believed to exist-and needless to say are not readily accessible to the general public. With this faithful reproduction of that first edition, one of the most important books ever published in America will finally be available again to a modern audience.
From 1890, this important contribution to the literature of the Southwest is a fictional novel of pre-Columbian Pueblo Indians, based on the author's experiences with the Native Americans of New Mexico.
Author Harriet Robinson (1825-1911), born Harriet Jane Hanson in Boston, offers a first person account of her life as a factory girl in Lowell, Massachusetts in this 1898 work. Robinson moved with her widowed mother and three siblings to Lowell as the cotton industry was booming, and began working as a bobbin duffer at the age of ten for $2 a week. Her reflections of the life, some 60 years later, are unfailingly upbeat. She was educated, in public school, by private lesson, and in church. The community was tightly knit. She also had the opportunity to write poetry and prose for the factory girls' literary magazine The Lowell Offering. When mill girls returned to their rural family homes, she says, "...instead of being looked down upon as 'factory girls,' they were more often welcomed as coming from the metropolis, bringing new fashions, new books, and new ideas with them.
In On Plymouth Rock, author and historian Samuel Adams Drake describes the beginning years of the first New England colony, from the Mayflower's arrival at Cape Cod through the settlement of Plymouth across the bay. Written specifically for "young minds," Drake focuses on the interaction of colonists like Myles Standish, Edward Winslow and William Bradford with Native Americans including Squanto, Samoset, and Massasoit. Originally published in 1897, Drake's book includes 19 black-and-white illustrations.
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