Vineyard Voices: Words, Faces and Voices of Island People
Edited by Linsey Lee

Here, in their own words excerpted from interviews with oral historian Linsey Lee, are the photographed portraits and stories of seventy-five Vineyarders, chronicling the continuity and the changes of life on the Vineyard over the last one hundred years. You will laugh, you will cry, you will travel the roads of the Vineyard with new eyes.

Where Magic Wears a Red Hat
The Art of Stanley Murphy

Across a career that spanned more than fifty years, Stanley Murphy painted Martha's Vineyard with the exacting eye of a seasoned craftsman and the magical soul of a poet; its fisherman and selectman and farmers and tribal elders; its seas and stones and fields and flowers; its fishes and cows and dogs. This book, the first to bring Stanley Murphy's art to a wider audience, focuses on the artist's Island portraits. More than thirty-five of his paintings and drawings, dating from the 1950s through the early years of the new century, are represented along with a personal reminiscence by collector and long-time friend Robert Doran and an original essay by Karal Ann Marling, Professor of Art History and American Studies at the University of Minnesota.

Allen Whiting: A Painter at Sixty
By Allen Whiting

Inspired by his sixtieth birthday, artist Allen Whiting hand-selected these paintings and sketches for a book of 115 color images of his work going back more than 30 years, with numerous small notes about the pieces, four essays about him by fellow artists, a foreword and afterward by Mr. Whiting and a poem written to him by his wife Lynne. The resulting collection is not only a sampling of a successful artist's career, but an intensely personal portrait of an artist's voice and its evolution.

Grant: A Biography
By William S. McFeely

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, this seminal biography of one of America's towering, enigmatic figures traces his boyhood in Ohio to the battlefields of the Civil War and his presidency during the crucial years of Reconstruction.

Mystery on Martha's Vineyard: Politics, Passion and Scandal on East Chop
By Thomas Dresser

Can someone really get away with murder? It happened on Martha's Vineyard in 1940. Drawn from dozens of interviews, hundreds of pages of trial testimony, and countless issues of old newspapers, augmented by current commentary contributed by law enforcement officials, historian Dresser revisits a cold crime scene with a fresh perspective on a sordid, grisly, unsolved murder near a local theatre.

So Ends This Day: The Portuguese in American Whaling
By Donald Warrin

So Ends This Day traces the history of the American whaling industry from its 17th century beginnings to its demise in the 1930s while highlighting the role of its Portuguese participants who dominated the industry in the final decades. Their story begins with Joseph Swazey who, in 1765, returned to Martha's Vineyard from an Atlantic whaling voyage; and each is a story of courage and determination in an industry in which many of these individuals advanced to positions of responsibility unparalleled among non-English-speaking immigrants to the United States.

Seen the Glory A Novel
By John Hough

In this compelling story of three Vineyard boys fighting for the Union, young brothers come of age while fighting in the Civil War. Hough's writing evokes the both the hardships and the camaraderie of ordinary soldiers and civilians set against the bloody drama of the Battle of Gettysburg.

Dorothy West's Paradise: A Biography of Class and Color
By Cherene Sherrard-Johnson

Dorothy West is best known as one of the youngest writers involved in the Harlem Renaissance, but West was also intimately rooted in a very different milieu—Oak Bluffs, an exclusive retreat for African Americans on Martha's Vineyard. She played an integral role in the development and preservation of that community—a place that West envisioned both as a separatist refuge and as a space for interracial contact. Dorothy West's Paradise captures the scope of the author's long life and career. An essential book for both fans of West's fiction and students of race, class, and American women's lives, it offers an intimate biography of an important author and a glimpse into the society that shaped her work.

Thomas Hart Benton: A Life
By Justin Wolff

Born in Missouri at the end of the nineteenth century, Thomas Hart Benton would become the most notorious and celebrated painter America had ever seen. In this definitive biography, Justin Wolff places Benton in the context of his tumultuous historical moment—as well as in the landscapes and cultural circles that inspired him. Thomas Hart Benton—with compelling insights into Benton's art, his philosophy, and his family history—rescues a great American artist from myth and hearsay, and provides an indelibly moving portrait of an influential, controversial, and often misunderstood man.

The Chappy Ferry Book: Back and Forth Between Two Worlds - 527 Feet Apart
By Tom Dunlop

The Chappy Ferry Book tells the amazing, dramatic, myth-busting, two-hundred-year-old story of the Chappaquiddick ferry with historic, previously unseen pictures as well as contemporary photographs by Alison Shaw. The book also includes a DVD by John Wilson hosted by summer resident Dick Ebersol, former chairman of NBC Sports, which weaves together interviews with owners and captains, as well as clips of the ferry at work. The Chappaquiddick ferry has been struck by a seaplane, splintered by a hurricane, and burned by a mid-channel fire. It served as the setting for a pivotal scene in "Jaws" and played a role in a tragic car accident that changed the island of Chappaquiddick and American history.

To the Harbor Light
By Alison Shaw

Combination art book and practical guide, well-known photographer Alison Shaw captures lighthouses on the Cape and Islands in her distinct and beautiful style. The book includes tips on seeing the lighthouses and historical facts that you will find nowhere else.

Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America
By Eric Jay Dolin

The epic history of the "iron men in wooden boats" who built an industrial empire through the pursuit of whales. This absorbing history demonstrates that few things can capture the danger and desperation of men on the deep sea as dramatically as whaling. The sweeping social and economic history provides rich and fantastic accounts of the men who mutinied, murdered, rioted, deserted, drank, scrimshawed, and recorded their experiences in journals and memoirs. Containing a wealth of naturalistic detail on whales, Leviathan is the most original and stirring history of American whaling in many decades.

Schooner: Building a Wooden Boat on Martha's Vineyard
By Tom Dunlap, Photos by Alison Shaw

Schooner takes you through the construction of Rebecca, a sixty-foot wooden schooner designed and built by Gannon and Benjamin of Vineyard Haven, one of the few boatyards in the United States devoted exclusively to traditional wooden boats. In words and extraordinary photos, you learn that she is, as one of her builders calls her, poetry on water.

Those Who Serve: Martha's Vineyard and WWII
Edited by Linsey Lee

During World War II, the entire Vineyard community mobilized to support the war effort, both on the home front and overseas. The personal stories and perspectives of Vineyard people who survived the war years are a part of the Museum's oral history collections and full narratives and photographs are transcribed here. They bring alive the horror and confusion of battle, the exhiliration of victory, and the shared sacrifice and anxiety experienced by those on the home front.

Faith & Boundaries: Colonists, Christianity, and Community Among the Wampanoag Indians of Martha's Vineyard, 1600 1871
By David J. Silverman

On an island marked by centralized English authority, missionary commitment, and an Indian majority, the Wampanoags' adaptation to English culture, especially Christianity, checked violence while safeguarding their land, community, and ironically, even customs. Yet the colonists' exploitation of Indian land and labor exposed the limits of Christian fellowship and thus hardened racial division. Silverman's account traces the history of the relationship between the Wampanoags of Gay Head and the English settlers.

Thirty Dirty Sailors and the Little Girl Who Went a-Whaling
By Dillon Bustin

When Laura Jernegan was six years old, she lived with her family aboard her father's mighty whaling ship and kept a diary of her three-year journey. This is a children's read-aloud book, with CD, about life at sea, with whales, the ocean, and thirty grim, gruff sailors as company.

Circle of Faith
By Sally Dagnall

The Martha's Vineyard Camp-Meeting, a community of charming painted cottages with a central iron tabernacle, is like another world and another time. Established 175 years ago as a religious summer retreat during an era of intense revivalism, the community draws thousands of visitors each year. It was the model for many post-Civil War religious camp-meeting sites and has been the subject of novels, histories, and photo books.
This is the story of how this famous community, now a National Historic Landmark, came to exist and survive, when others fell into ruin. It is a must read for those interested in the past, in religion, and in Martha's Vineyard.

In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex
By Nathaniel Philbrick

In the Heart of the Sea brings to new life the incredible story of the wreck of the whaleship Essex--the inspiration for the climax of Moby-Dick.
In 1820, the 240-ton Essex set sail from Nantucket on a routine voyage for whales. Fifteen months later, in the farthest reaches of the South Pacific, it was repeatedly rammed and sunk by an eighty-ton bull sperm whale. Its twenty-man crew made for the 3,000-mile-distant coast of South America in three tiny boats.
In the Heart of the Sea tells perhaps the greatest sea story ever: the ordeal of ordinary men with a wealth of whale lore. Impeccably researched and beautifully told, the book delivers the ultimate portrait of man against nature.

Shipwrecks on Martha's Vineyard
By Dorothy R. Scoville

Countless vessels have been wrecked off the shores of Martha's Vineyard. This book explores the fascinating and often tragic stories behind these ill-fated voyages through photos, paintings, and wreckage that has washed ashore.

From the seventeenth century to the early years of the twentieth, the population of Martha's Vineyard manifested an extremely high rate of profound hereditary deafness. In stark contrast to the experience of most deaf people in our own society, the Vineyarders who were born deaf were so thoroughly integrated into the daily life of the community that they were not seen--and did not see themselves--as handicapped or as a group apart. Deaf people were included in all aspects of life, such as town politics, jobs, church affairs, and social life. How was this possible?
On the Vineyard, hearing and deaf islanders alike grew up speaking sign language. This unique sociolinguistic adaptation meant that the usual barriers to communication between the hearing and the deaf, which so isolate many deaf people today, did not exist.

A lady garbage collector? Who uses a boat? Yes, that's Ellie, and she's a salty Yankee who charges around Edgartown Harbor in an old catboat, taking no nonsense from visiting skippers in their shiny yachts. When Ellie doesn't appear one morning, her friends begin to worry, and when people begin to get mysteriously sick, even the Mayor takes up the search. What they learn is that garbage can pollute a harbor and conservation begins with every boat owner properly depositing their trash. This introduction to conservation for children was a Junior Literary Guild selection and reprinted twice in an anthology. Partly fictionalized, it gives a true account of Ellie's important work and is republished by popular demand. Grades 2-4.

The History of Martha's Vineyard
By Charles Banks

Banks' three-volume work is the definitive Island history. This set covers everything from the original settlement of the English through 1900. The Island's history, the formation of individual each town, and the most complete Island geneaology ever published. Rated as one of the finest works of local history.
Volume 3, Island geneaology, available seperately.

Morning of Fire follows master navigator and charismatic captain John Kendrick through each perilous turn of his adventures aboard the Lady Washington and the Columbia Rediviva. This meticulously researched story uncovers the full scope of a landmark American voyage that came at the volatile close of the eighteenth century, a time when superpowers Spain and Britain clashed over territory and the fledgling United States stood caught in the middle. As Scott Ridley relates Kendrick's fateful struggle to plant the seed of an "empire of liberty" in the Pacific, he shapes a bold and exciting chronicle of a momentous odyssey. Morning of Fire is popular history at its best.