News and Events for Nantucket Island
~ 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 […]
~ by Amy Jenness ~ In 1778 Captain James Cook and his crew were the first westerners to visit the islands of Hawaii, and they found there a rich Polynesian culture built over many centuries. But things did not go well for Cook, who was killed by the locals after […]
~ by Amy Jenness, author of On This Day In Nantucket History ~ The sun will be an economically viable source of electricity within a decade, and solar panels have the potential to surpass fossil fuel, wind, and nuclear power production by 2050. That is the opinion of the International […]
~ by Amy Jenness ~ In June of 1916 the Inquirer & Mirror ran an item in its “Waterfront” column recounting the story of a recent Nantucket visitor looking to hire a car. The man, who had never been here before, asked a group of local men for information about […]
~ by Amy Jenness ~ In the days following the Confederate Army’s attack and capture of North Carolina’s Fort Sumter in 1861, island residents worried that the South would also target Nantucket. In April a voluntary group of men called the “Island Guards” met at Mill Hill each day to […]
English Admiral Sir Isaac Coffin visited Nantucket just once, in 1826, but his visit led to the creation of a school that educated generations of Nantucket children. To mark the 190th anniversary of the admiral’s trip, the NHA invites visitors to explore The Coffin School through rarely-seen artifacts from a […]
~ by Carl Oscar Olson ~ With a global population of over 7 billion human beings, it’s hard to imagine that any open space free of houses, highways, or high rises still exists. That is especially so for a very small and very attractive destination island like Nantucket. Short supply […]
~ by Amy Jenness ~ When 200 women and 100 men gathered in upstate New York in 1848 for America’s first women’s-rights convention, they unanimously agreed that women should be given the same freedoms as men: the right to speak publicly, pursue an education, get a job, practice a religion […]
