News and Events for Nantucket Island
~ 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 […]
~ 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 […]
