When the massive metal tank filled with sticky brown molasses that rises up over her crowded North End neighborhood explodes, young Carmen must fight for her life, as a tsunami of molasses rushes through the streets.

Once again, the author takes a remarkable shard of history and brings it to vivid life. In 1665, a young man from Martha's Vineyard became the first Native American to graduate from Harvard College. Upon this slender factual scaffold, she has created a luminous tale of love and faith, magic and adventure. The narrator of the story is Bethia Mayfield, growing up in the tiny settlement of Great Harbor amid a small band of pioneers and Puritans. Restless and curious, she yearns after an education that is closed to her by her sex. As often as she can, she slips away to explore the island's glistening beaches and observe its native Wampanoag inhabitants. At twelve, she encounters Caleb, the young son of a chieftain, and the two forge a tentative secret friendship that draws each into the alien world of the other. Bethia's minister father tries to convert the Wampanoag, awakening the wrath of the tribe's shaman, against whose magic he must test his own beliefs. One of his projects becomes the education of Caleb, and a year later, Caleb is in Cambridge, studying Latin and Greek among the colonial elite. There, Bethia finds herself reluctantly indentured as a housekeeper and can closely observe Caleb's crossing of cultures. Like the author's beloved narrator Anna, in Year of Wonders, Bethia proves an emotionally irresistible guide to the wilds of Martha's Vineyard and the intimate spaces of the human heart.

Seth Mnookin was given access never before granted to a reporter for this fascinating inside account of the Boston Red Sox. As a result he has written perhaps the best book yet about a professional sports team in America. Feeding the Monster shows what it takes to win a championship, both on and off the field. Seth Mnookin spent mornings in the front office, afternoons in the clubhouse, and evenings in the owners' box. He learned how the Sox persuaded Curt Schilling to sign, why Nomar Garciaparra resented his teammates, and what led to Pedro Martinez's acrimonious exit. He knows the real story behind Theo Epstein's brief departure and witnessed the development of his rift with Larry Lucchino. And in a new epilogue, Mnookin examines the 2006 offseason, including the negotiations for Japanese phenom Daisuke Matsuzaka. In a juicy narrative that is filled with thrilling detail, Feeding the Monster peels back the curtain to show what it means to be a part of a major league sports team today.

Salem, Massachusetts, 1692. In a plain meetinghouse a woman stands before her judges. The accusers, girls and young women, are fervent and overexcited. The accused is a poor, unpopular woman who had her first child before she was married. As the trial proceeds the girls begin to wail, tear their clothing, and scream that the woman is hurting them. Some of them expose wounds to the horrified onlookers, holding out the pins that have stabbed them -- pins that appeared as if by magic. Are they acting or are they really tormented by an unseen evil? Whatever the cause, the nightmare has begun: The witch trials will eventually claim twenty-five lives, shatter the community, and forever shape the American social conscience.

The early American Congregational minister and author Cotton Mather (1663-1728), remembered mainly for his participation in the Salem witch trials, is perhaps the greatest and most misunderstood figure in pre-revolutionary American history. Mather believed his main purpose in life was to do good and he devoted his life to praying, preaching, and writing, eventually publishing more than 400 works.

The well-known columnist and commentator offers a funny and poignant memoir of his youth as a Jew growing up in Boston and of the influences that molded him, from the Boston Latin school, to the candy store, to jazz

From the Publisher: In the early 1990s, Classics professor Mary Lefkowitz discovered that one of her faculty colleagues at Wellesley College was teaching his students that Greek culture had been stolen from Africa and that Jews were responsible for the slave trade. This book tells the disturbing story of what happened when she spoke out. Lefkowitz quickly learned that to investigate the origin and meaning of myths composed by people who have for centuries been dead and buried is one thing, but it is quite another to critique myths that living people take very seriously. She also found that many in academia were reluctant to challenge the fashionable idea that truth is merely a form of opinion. For her insistent defense of obvious truths about the Greeks and the Jews, Lefkowitz was embroiled in turmoil for a decade. She faced institutional indifference, angry colleagues, reverse racism, anti-Semitism, and even a lawsuit intended to silence her. In History Lesson Lefkowitz describes what it was like to experience directly the power of both postmodernism and compensatory politics. She offers personal insights into important issues of academic values and political correctness, and she suggests practical solutions for the divisive and painful problems that arise when a political agenda takes precedence over objective scholarship. Her forthright tale uncovers surprising features in the landscape of higher education and an unexpected need for courage from those who venture there

Award-winning historian Alfred F. Young unearths a rich story of the American Revolution with this account of George Robert Twelves Hewes, a Boston shoemaker who took part in such key events as the Boston Massacre and the Tea Party, and then served in the militia and as a seaman

In humorous verse Plymouth Rock tells the story of itself, from glacial erratic to national icon--with historical asides and corrections by the fact checker.

Brandeis University is the United States' only Jewish-sponsored nonsectarian university, and while only being established after World War II, it has risen to become one of the most respected universities in the nation. The faculty and alumni of the university have made exceptional contributions to myriad disciplines, but they have played a surprising formidable role in American politics. Stephen J. Whitfield makes the case for the pertinence of Brandeis University in understanding the vicissitudes of American liberalism since the mid-twentieth century. Founded to serve as a refuge for qualified professors and students haunted by academic antisemitism, Brandeis University attracted those who generally envisioned the republic as worthy of betterment. Whether as liberals or as radicals, figures associated with the university typically adopted a critical stance toward American society and sometimes acted upon their reformist or militant beliefs. This volume is not an institutional history, but instead shows how one university, over the course of seven decades, employed and taught remarkable men and women who belong in our accounts of the evolution of American politics, especially on the left. In vivid prose, Whitfield invites readers to appreciate a singular case of the linkage of political influence with the fate of a particular university in modern America.

Over the last forty years, Aaron Lansky has jumped into dumpsters, rummaged around musty basements, and crawled through cramped attics. He did all of this in pursuit of a particular kind of treasure, and he's found plenty. Lansky's treasure was any book written in Yiddish, the language of generations of European Jews. When he started looking for Yiddish books, experts estimated there might be about 70,000 still in existence. Since then, the MacArthur Genius Grant recipient has collected close to 1.5 million books, and he's finding more every day.

In 1931 Worcester, Massachusetts, Joey Singer, the teenaged son of Jewish immigrants, suffers with his family through the early part of the Great Depression, trying to finish high school, working a milk delivery route, marching on Washington, and eventually even becoming a hobo, all the while trying to figure out how to go to college and realize his dream of becoming a writer. Includes author's note about the Depression.

Book by Solomon, Barbara Miller

Autobiography of an Ex-White Man is an intensely personal meditation on the nature of America by a White Philosopher who joined a Black Studies Department and found his understanding of the world transformed by the experience. The book begins with an autobiographical narrative of the events leading up to Wolff's transfer from a Philosophy Department to the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, and his experiences in the Department with his new colleagues, all of whom had come to Academia from the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Wolff discovered that the apparently simple act of moving across campus to a new Department in a new building worked a startling change in the way he saw himself, his university, and his country. Reading as widely as possible to bring himself up to speed in his new field of academic responsibility, Wolff realized after a bit that his picture of American history and culture was undergoing an irreversible metamorphosis. America, he realized, has from its inception been a land both of Freedom and of Bondage: Freedom for the few, and then for those who are White; Bondage at first for the many, and then for those who are not White. Slavery is thus not an aberration, an accident, a Peculiar Institution -- it is the essence and core of the American experience. Wolff's optimistic outlook leads him to express the hope that our acknowledging the realities of America's racial history and present will begin to tear down the formidable barrier to change. He sees this refashioning of the American story as a first step toward the crafting of a truly liberatory project. Robert Paul Wolff is Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and the author of numerous books, including Introductory Philosophy and In Defense of Anarchism.

Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, born in 1903 and scion of a preeminent Lithuanian Orthodox family, was one of the most towering intellectual figures of American Orthodoxy in the twentieth century. After receiving rabbinic ordination and completing his studies toward a Ph.D., he immigrated to America where he served as the Rosh Yeshiva at the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary of Yeshiva University. As the leader of centrist Orthodoxy in America for more than fifty years, his many accomplishments included his founding of the Maimonides School in Boston in 1937. Rabbi Soloveitchik served as the intellectual and spiritual force behind the Maimonides School from its founding and was responsible for its innovative curriculum. Synthesizing American educational methodologies and European Orthodox approaches to education, the Maimonides School became a prototype for an American Orthodox educational institution. Unique among contemporary Orthodox day schools, the coeducational nature of the classes at Maimonides, and to some extent the curriculum, was groundbreaking. Characterized by academic excellence in both Judaic studies and other subjects, the school offered boys and girls exactly the same education. Rabbi Soloveitchik’s school was particularly innovative by offering Talmud classes to girls on the same level as boys. The Maimonides School became a paradigm for the fledgling Orthodox Jewish day school movement nationwide. The character of the education there influenced later developments in the Orthodox community, such as the emphasis on higher level Torah study for women. By articulating a philosophy that advocated both traditional Orthodoxy as well as modernism and Americanism, the school gradually affected Boston’s Orthodox community, which came to be guided by its principles. As Seth Farber points out, the school, once rejected by the Jewish establishment in Boston, was eventually embraced by it. A community that saw no contradiction between democratic values and traditional Orthodox lifestyle emerged in Boston. This modern Orthodox community ultimately represented a significant voice in Boston’s Jewish and America's Orthodox cultures.

From the "New York Times"-bestselling author of "Cod, Salt," and "The Big Oyster" comes the colorful story of a way of life that for hundreds of years has defined much of America's coastlines but is slowly disappearing. Illustrated.

In this now-classic work in legal and constitutional theory, Stanley I. Kutler examines one of the Supreme Court's most celebrated decisions. In 1837, the Court rules that the state of Massachusetts had the right to erect a free bridge over the Charles River even though it had previously chartered a privately owned toll bridge at the same location. The Court's decision fostered the idea of "creative destruction," a process that encourages new forms of property at the expense of older ones. Exploring the origins, context, and impact of this decision, Kutler integrates traditional American constitutional history with the "new legal history: that emphasizes the social and economic bases of legal change.