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Another City upon a Hill
A New England Memoir
Published by: Tagus Press
Series: Portuguese in the Americas Series
216 Pages, 6.00 x 9.00 x 0.80 in, 10 illus.
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This gripping memoir is both a personal story and a portrait of a distinctive New England place—Fall River, Massachusetts, once the cotton cloth capital of America. Growing up, Joseph Conforti's world was defined by rolling hills, granite mills, and forests of triple-deckers. Conforti, whose mother was Portuguese and whose father was Italian, recounts how he negotiated those identities in a city where ethnic heritage mattered. Paralleling his own account, Conforti shares the story of his family, three generations of Portuguese and Italians who made their way in this once-mighty textile city.
JOSEPH A. CONFORTI is Distinguished Professor of American and New England Studies Emeritus at University of Southern Maine. He is the author of five books, including Saints and Strangers: New England in British North America and the acclaimed Imagining New England: Explorations of Regional Identity from the Pilgrims to the Mid-twentieth Century.
"Conforti has written a marvelously engaging memoir of self-discovery and the making of a historian. By exploring and coming to terms with his roots in a New England mill city, he tells a story that is quintessentially American. Always aware of context, from his boyhood in Fall River in the 1950s to his young adulthood in the 1970s, Conforti treats the reader to often brilliant and sometimes humorous insight into the ethnic cultures of New England, its industrial and Yankee past, its post-industrial present, and its sometimes seedy politics."—Ron Formisano, author of The Tea Party: A Brief History and Boston Against Busing: Race, Class and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s
"An expert historian's wonderfully honest memoir of growing up in Fall River, 'the city of hills, mills, and dinner pails.' It's an authentic American story, beautifully told."—Gordon S. Wood, Professor of History Emeritus, Brown University, and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Radicalism of the American Revolution