Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
New Hampshire
Its waters drove our first Industrial Revolution, and were poisoned by it. Henry David Thoreau believed that the Merrimack might not run pure again for thousands of years, but today, it is a welcoming pathway through a hundred-mile-long red-brick museum of America’s rise to power.
Up fierce Mount Washington by rail and auto routes from the 1860s
Every December, a 350-year-old New Hampshire port re-creates centuries of changing holiday traditions.
The days leading up to Christmas in the old New Hampshire coastal town of Portsmouth have a refreshing quality, even an astringent one at times. And on a weekend’s visit you won’t be forced back into a specific—and sentimentalized—era.
They border each other, they look alike, and most outsiders have a hard time separating the two. Yet residents know the differences are enormous.
They’re like brothers who, as only the family knows, couldn’t be more different. With a landscape of open, rolling farmland and small villages with white-steepled churches, Vermont is the most rural state in the Union, according to Census Bureau statistics.
He had all the right qualities. Only the time was wrong.
It’s been a long time since anyone put in a good word, or in fact any kind of word at all, for Franklin Pierce. I am a New Hampshire man who lives not far from the house where the 14th president was born and who therefore grew up, so to speak, beneath his paling shadow.
The life and death of the world’s largest textile mill, in the words of the men and women who worked there
Labor history is too often told in one of two equally unsatisfactory ways—in the icy language of economics, or in the fiery rhetoric of ideologues. Either way, the real people get overlooked.
Of herbal medicine, a “doctor” named Samuel Thomson, and a sure cure for almost everything…
In the late 1820’s and 1830’s American physicians found themselves with a major rebellion on their hands.
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