My earlier book, The Wrights of Vermont (Wheatmark, 2013), reported the search I began about ten years ago for my father's Vermont forebears. I had learned a lot, especially about my grandmother's heroic efforts to save her shaky marriage. Eventually she left Vermont to begin a new life on Staten Island for herself and her two sons, Dad and Uncle Ray. This book shows Dad and Mother starting their family on Staten Island and describes our home, our neighborhood, the boarding house where we sometimes dined, the schools we attended, the songs we sang, how we learned to think about money, work, fun, guilt, and politics, and our experience, especially mine, of illness, solitude, and books. Later chapters show our horizons expanding. They tell where we went on outings and how we spent our summers (ours at a riverside cottage near the New Jersey coast, and mine at an unusual summer camp in upstate New York), and they sketch the different world we found when we moved to Manhattan in 1941. I entered Columbia then and began to discover new realms of literature, philosophy, and music. Then at eighteen, with other young men of that time, I was swept up into military service in the U.S. Army and war in France and Germany.

When my sister and brother and I were growing up on Staten Island, Dad told us very little about his Vermont boyhood, and nothing at all about his father. We respected his silence. We figured he had good reason for it. But long after Dad's death, my sister and I started to look more closely at our family history. Soon we were connected to a world of New England striving and struggle that we came to see as part of our own Vermont heritage. So this is the story of Dad and his mother and brother, and his unreliable father, and his father's five sisters, whom we'd known nothing about before we began our research. It pays tribute to an everyday heroine, Dad's mother, who took her sons to Staten Island to begin a new life when her marriage failed. It also traces earlier Wrights (and forebears with other surnames, like Little, Bailey, Hadley, Hathaway, Shattuck, Blanchard, and Burt) in towns all over Vermont (and New Hampshire and Massachusetts), some of them with their own compelling stories -- farmers, soldiers, railroad men, miners, housewives, and keepers of inns and hotels. These are my Wrights of Vermont.

Winner of the 2005 New Jersey Author Award for Scholarly Non-Fiction from the New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance Long before Bruce Springsteen picked up a guitar; before Danny DeVito drove a taxi; before Jack Nicholson flew over the cuckoo's nest, Asbury Park was a seashore Shangri-La filled with shimmering odes to civic greatness, world-renowned baby parades, temples of retail, and atmospheric movie palaces. It was a magnet for tourists, a summer vacation mecca-to some degree New Jersey's own Coney Island. In Asbury Park's Glory Days, award-winning author Helen-Chantal Pike chronicles the city's heyday-the ninety-year period between 1890 and 1980. Pike illuminates the historical conditions contributing to the town's cycle of booms and recessions. She investigates the factors that influenced these peaks, such as location, lodging, dining, nightlife, merchandising, and immigration, and how and why millions of people spent their leisure time within this one-square-mile boundary on the northern coast of the state. Pike also includes an epilogue describing recent attempts to resurrect this once-vibrant city.

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Looks at the life and work of the provocative Catholic social reformer from the personal point of view of someone who knew her well, her granddaughter.

This book describes the living-room artifacts, clothing styles, and intellectual proclivities of American classes from top to bottom.

For almost fifty years, through her tireless service to the poor and her courageous witness for peace, Dorothy Day offered an example of the gospel in action. Now the publication of her diaries, previously sealed for twenty-five years after her death, offers a uniquely intimate portrait of her struggles and concerns. Beginning in 1934 and ending in 1980, these diaries reflect her response to the vast changes in America, the Church, and the wider world. Day experienced most of the great social movements of her time but, as these diaries reveal, even while she labored for a transformed world, she simultaneously remained grounded in everyday human life: the demands of her extended Catholic worker family; her struggles to be more patient and charitable; the discipline of prayer and worship that structured her days; her efforts to find God in all the tasks and encounters of daily life. A story of faithful striving for holiness and the radical transformation of the world, Day’s life challenges readers to imagine what it would be like to live as if the gospels were true.

When Framboise Simon returns to a small village on the banks of the Loire, the locals do not recognize her as the daughter of the infamous woman they hold responsible for a tragedy during the German occupation years ago. But the past and present are inextricably entwined, particularly in a scrapbook of recipes and memories that Framboise has inherited from her mother. And soon Framboise will realize that the journal also contains the key to the tragedy that indelibly marked that summer of her ninth year. . . .

Published in conjunction with the ground breaking exhibition WWII & NYC at the New-York Historical Society, this fascinating book captures the little-told but epic story of New York in the years 1939-1945, the war's impact on the metropolis, and the challenges New Yorkers faced in a city mobilised for war.

This authoritative catalogue of the Corcoran Gallery of Art's renowned collection of pre-1945 American paintings will greatly enhance scholarly and public understanding of one of the finest and most important collections of historic American art in the world. Composed of more than 600 objects dating from 1740 to 1945.