News and Events for Nantucket Island
~ by Amy Jenness ~ In 1913 an Edgartown fisherman named Sam Jackson was dragging for flounder around Tuckernuck Shoal when he discovered a massive bed of quahogs and forever changed the island’s shellfish industry. For centuries local fishermen had harvested large clams, also known as quahogs, as well as […]
~ by Katherine Brooks, Maria Mitchell Association ~ Have you seen stones inscribed with these messages? “Northern Extremity of the Town’s Meridian Line” “Southern Extremity of the Town’s Meridian Line” These two stones are located near the Pacific National Bank and the Fair Street Quaker Meetinghouse in downtown Nantucket. The […]
~ by Amy Jenness ~ More than 100 years after the first white people settled on Nantucket, the French-American writer Hector St. John de Crevecoer visited and recorded his perceptions of island life in his influential book Letters From An American Farmer. Published in 1782, the book was the first […]
Nantucket whalers circled the world, exploring unknown oceans, charting their way navigating by the sun and stars. We all hold an iconic image from the days of sail of a captain fixing his position with a sextant. Fans of Patrick O’Brian or Horatio Hornblower recall the recurring scenes of a […]
~ by Rebecca Nimerfroh ~ If you are ever lucky enough to look up at the Nantucket sky on a clear summer night, no doubt you will be taken aback by what you see; thousands upon thousands of stars, twinkling back at you from thousands of light years away, enveloping […]
~ by Amy Jenness ~ Massachusetts lawmakers are debating a bill designed to allow tiny houses on Nantucket. Town meeting voters approved the idea this year and islanders hope allowing tiny homes – which are up to 500 square feet in size and often built on trailers– will ease the […]
~ by Amy Jenness ~ For centuries Nantucket mariners used the ocean as a global superhighway that took them away on business ventures to almost every continent. But when the United States entered World War I, the island’s culture of the sea shifted to the sky. The months around the […]
~ by Jascin N. Leonardo Finger, MMA Deputy Director and Curator of the Mitchell House, Archives & Special Collections ~ In 1848, Nantucket-born and raised Maria Mitchell (1818-1889) was invited to become the first female member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This […]
by Richard Trust Herman Raucher has spent only two weeks on Nantucket, but those 14 days have created a lifetime of bittersweet memories – and then some. Don’t dismiss the “then some”—it has paid a lot of bills. Raucher’s fortnight on Nantucket 74 years ago was captured in the 1971 […]
