"In the winter of 1969, the bodies of four young women were discovered in a cemetery near the tip of Cape Cod. In a place once known as Helltown, the victims had been shot, stabbed, dismembered, and mutilated. As investigators would soon learn, the perpetrator was a young, handsome, serial killer named Tony Costa. A bizarre former taxidermist with a split personality and penchant for violence, Costa ultimately mobilized friends in the hippie community...

"For this revised and updated edition, author and lifetime Bostonian Michael Connelly will conduct interviews with runners of the 2013 Marathon and those preparing to run in 2014 - which will prove to be the Marathon's most historic and highly attended. While still containing the wonderful trivia, history, and traditions from the original 26 Miles to Boston, this updated edition widens the POV, weaving in the shocking events surrounding the 2013 race,...

"The graveyards of old New England hold an incredible range of poetic messages in the epitaphs etched into the gravestones, each a profound expression of emotion, culture, religion, and literature. These epitaphs are old, but their themes are timeless: mourning and faith, grief and hope, loss, and memory. This book tells the story of a years-long walk among gravestones and shares insights gained along the way. It identifies the source texts and authors...

"Beginning in January 1692, Salem Village in colonial Massachusetts witnessed the largest and most lethal outbreak of witchcraft in early America. Villagers--mainly young women--suffered from unseen torments that caused them to writhe, shriek, and contort their bodies, complaining of pins stuck into their flesh and of being haunted by specters. Believing that they suffered from assaults by an invisible spirit, the community began a hunt to track down...

"A dramatic untold 'people's history' of the storied event that helped trigger the American Revolution"-- The story of the Boston Massacre--when on a late winter evening in 1770, British soldiers shot five local men to death--is familiar to generations. But from the very beginning, many accounts have obscured a fascinating truth: the Massacre arose from conflicts that were as personal as they were political. Professor Serena Zabin draws on original...

"Will Dowd takes us on a whimsical journey through one year of New England weather in this engaging collection of essays. As unpredictable as its subject, Areas of Fog combines wit and poetry with humor and erudition. A fun, breezy, and discursive read, it is an intellectual game that exposes the artificiality of genres. Will Dowd is a writer and artist based outside Boston. He obtained his MFA in Creative Writing from New York University, where he...

"Secret societies have fundamentally shaped America's cultural and political landscapes. In ways that are expected but never explicit, the bonds made and lessons learned through the most elite of secret societies have helped make their members senators, governors, ambassadors, CIA directors, Supreme Court justices, and even presidents. At the apex of these institutions stands Yale University and its ancient six secret societies, with their modern--and...

"PEZ is an American classic and a staple of many childhood memories. Yet it originated in Austria, where PEZ began in 1927 as compressed peppermint tablets marketed as an alternative to smoking. Upon arrival in the United States in 1952, PEZ quickly took a new direction, adding fruit flavors and three-dimensional character heads to top the dispensers. Now produced in Orange, Connecticut, the iconic PEZ brand is available in over eighty countries,...

Documents the story of the creation of Van Morrison's "Astral Weeks" album against a backdrop of the political and cultural turmoil of 1968 Boston, examining how other artists raised awareness about key historical events and issues.

"This long-overdue biography reestablishes William Monroe Trotter's essential place next to Douglass, Du Bois, and King in the pantheon of American civil rights heroes. William Monroe Trotter (1872- 1934), though still virtually unknown to the wider public, was an unlikely American hero. With the stylistic verve of a newspaperman and the unwavering fearlessness of an emancipator, he galvanized black working- class citizens to wield their political...