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Preface: Do Good Walls Make Good Neighbors?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 December 2010

David J. Silverman
Affiliation:
George Washington University, Washington DC
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Summary

The inspiration for this study came, innocently enough, with a walk along a stone wall. Linda, my fiancé (now my wife), and I were on a late May vacation after I had finished my first year of graduate school. Short of money and in desperate need of some time outside, we were lucky to have a week at a ramshackle timeshare on the island of Martha's Vineyard, just off Cape Cod in Massachusetts. I wanted this trip to be a diversion from my studies of early America, and when the island greeted us with glorious sun and lilac-perfumed sea air I knew it would not disappoint. No sooner had we set down our bags than we ventured out for a hike, unwilling to watch the day pass. An arbitrarily chosen trail led us winding through scrub pine and oak trees, past the weed-choked foundations of a colonial-era farmstead, and up a gradual peak, until it ended at a boulder split by a deep diagonal crack sitting atop a wooded hill. This landmark, our tourist literature explained, was called Waskosim's Rock and figured prominently in the oral tradition of the island's Indians, a group that I mistakenly assumed – as I soon discovered much to my embarrassment – had disappeared several generations ago, leaving whatever stories they once told about this monument to conjecture now.

Type
Chapter
Information
Faith and Boundaries
Colonists, Christianity, and Community among the Wampanoag Indians of Martha's Vineyard, 1600–1871
, pp. xix - xxiv
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2005

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