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 […]
~ 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 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 […]
~ 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 […]
~ by Amy Jenness, author of On This Day In Nantucket History ~ Isolated out to sea and staunchly Quaker, and therefore pacifist, Nantucketers nonetheless got pulled into British conflict long before the American Revolution. Island whaleships had to contend with European privateers capturing their ships as early as 1744. […]
