Finding out about some Salem connections in my family's genealogy -- obviously, the accused survived to produce descendants, but wow...! What some of them went through... Like something out of a horror movie. Found a book that talks specifically about the Andover "witches" -- which is a nice accompaniment to one we already had in our "library"!
#WitchHunt #NewEnglandHistory #SalemWitches #Books #Bookstodon #HistoryBooks #MassachusettsHistory

Excited to have the latest issue of The New England Quarterly in hand, which includes several great articles and a *bilingual* review of Kirsten Silva Gruesz’s Cotton Mather’s Spanish Lessons. #VastEarlyAmerica #NEQ #NewEnglandHistory

Gravestone at Old Burial Ground, Boylston MA 06/15/23 #gravestone #grave #gravestonesfromthe1700s #headstone #cemetery #cemeteryphotography #taphophile #18thcentury #graveyard #graveyardphotography #boylston #massachusetts #newengland #history #oldburialground #cemeteryexploring #newenglandhistory #photography

The Stone Walls of New England, Sermons in Stone

“There once may have been 250,000 miles of stone walls in America's Northeast, stretching farther than the distance to the moon. They took three billion man-hours to build. And even though most are crumbling today, they contain a magnificent scientific and cultural story--about the geothermal forces that formed their stones, the tectonic movements that brought them to the surface, the glacial tide that broke them apart, the earth that held them for so long, and about the humans who built them.”
~ Robert Thorsen, University of Connecticut Geologist and author of “Stone by Stone: The Magnificent History in New England's Stone Walls” 2009

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
[..]
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
~ Robert Frost, excerpt from “Mending Wall”, 1914

...And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.
I would not change it.
William Shakespeare, “As You Like It” Act II, Scene 1

From thirty thousand to fifteen thousand years ago, massive ice sheets advanced over North America, scouring the native bedrock and plucking out and depositing stones in a process called ablation. Eleven thousand years ago, the glaciers finally retreated leaving a barren and rocky landscape in the area that would become New England. Over the millenia a deep and fertile soil formed that nourished lush forests and thick vegetation, and the stones that would someday become the famous stone walls of New England lay hidden under the thickening layer of humus on the forest floor waiting: More here: https://www.earthmagazine.org/article/history-science-and-poetry-new-englands-stone-walls/

Science gives us a fascinating glimpse of what lies beneath the forests that now envelope many New England farms abandoned in the latter half of the 19th century. Using lidar that can see landscapes even through dense forest cover, University of Connecticut geographers Katharine Johnson and William Ouimet conducted aerial surveys of the heavily forested areas of three southern New England towns. The researchers found remnants of a former agropolis, vast networks of roads and stone walls that have been hidden for more than a century beneath the dense cover of oak and spruce trees. More here: https://www.science.org/content/article/lasers-unearth-lost-agropolis-new-england

When the pilgrams reached the shores of New England in the early 16th century what greeted them was not the stones, but the fertile soil and the pervasive forests. A Swedish botanist traveling in the mid 1700s wrote that "The Europeans coming to America found a rich, fine soil before them, lying loose between the trees as the best in a garden. They had nothing to do but to cut down the wood, put it up in heaps, and to clear the dead leaves away." And the new Americans did exactly that, clear-cutting the rich forests, and by the mid 1800s, 60 to 80 percent of the land had been cleared making rich farmland ripe for the plowing.

By 1775, the trees were gone, and the farming efforts had churned up the stones, but their sermons were not silenced.

Learn more about Robert Thorsen’s, the author of Stone By Stone, work here: https://stonewall.uconn.edu/

See Good Fences: A Pictorial History of New England’s Stone Walls: https://goo.gl/aBM7Ge

Learn more about the Science Behind Stone Walls here: https://www.savatree.com/science-behind-stone-walls.html

#StoneWallsOfNewEngland #Glaciation #Ablation #NewEnglandHistory #geology #ScienceMastodon @geology

@overholt

love this #RecipeBook
How can I find out more about Ann Senhouse or other #CommonPlaceBooks in the collection?

#NewEnglandHistory
#WomensHistory
#Histodons

Happy #Thanksgiving! If you'd like to learn more about 17th Century New England history, the truth of the first Thanksgiving, and the rarely taught devastating Metacom's War, I recommend the highly readable "Mayflower" by Nathaniel Philbrick. It's well researched and reads as a narrative, rather than densely academic. #KnowYourHistory!

#NewEngland #Metacomet #KingPhilipsWar #NewEnglandHistory #Massachusetts #BookRecommendation #NativeAmericanHistory #NativePeoples