Meetinghouses Of Early New England

Checklist of New England meetinghouses and churches built by 1830 and still standing.

Using only four-by-five-inch sheet film and natural light, photographer Paul Wainwright collected and presents images, both internal and external, of New England's remaining colonial meetinghouses.

Reproduction of the original. The publishing house Megali specialises in reproducing historical works in large print to make reading easier for people with impaired vision.

Those interested in religion, genealogy, architecture, or local history will revel in this thoroughly researched celebration of 138 Quaker meetinghouses throughout New England. Packed with photos and organised by state, it contains information about each building's location, architect, size, cost, and current use. The histories of the houses are described, and each entry indicates whether the meetinghouse has a burial ground. Also included are fascinating stories of fires and feuds, information about prominent members of each, and glimpses of New England humour. Maps, directions, a glossary, and indexes of Quaker family names and meetinghouses by architectural style make this not just a beautiful but an educational and practical reference.

Say "New England" and you likely conjure up an image in the mind of your listener: the snowy woods or stone wall of a Robert Frost poem, perhaps, or that quintessential icon of the region--the idyllic white village. Such images remind us that, as Joseph Conforti notes, a region is not just a territory on the ground. It is also a place in the imagination. This ambitious work investigates New England as a cultural invention, tracing the region's changing identity across more than three centuries. Incorporating insights from history, literature, art, material culture, and geography, it shows how succeeding generations of New Englanders created and broadcast a powerful collective identity for their region through narratives about its past. Whether these stories were told in the writings of Frost or Harriet Beecher Stowe, enacted in historical pageants or at colonial revival museums, or conveyed in the pages of a geography textbook or Yankee magazine, New Englanders used them to sustain their identity, revising them as needed to respond to the shifting regional landscape.

Checklist of New England meetinghouses and churches built by 1830 and still standing.