Browsing by Subject "New England"
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Item Funeral for a Whale(2023) Cohen, Michael Todd; Orange, Michelle; Burke, Porscha; MFA in Creative NonfictionAt ten, queer adoptee Michael Todd Cohen witnessed the bloody burial of a thirty-foot whale on a New England beach near his home. Five years later, in the last months and days of his adoptive father’s battle with terminal cancer, Cohen sees it as a metaphor for the life-altering secret buried between them. Then, widowed at thirty-two, when his husband is lost in a high-rise fire, Cohen struggles to make sense of a world that takes more than it gives. This lyric field journal from the fraught borderlands of sexuality, home, family, grief, and faith asks: in the land of capitalism, who determines our worth? What precisely is the value of grief? And how do we invest in each other when futures are uncertain?Item The First Sexual Revolution: A Comparative Study of Premarital Pregnancy Rates in Maryland and Massachusetts: 1700-1810(2018-01-01) Parker, Samantha Marie; Bouton, Terry; History; Historical StudiesThis study tracks the rates of premarital pregnancy among couples in three Maryland church communities during the eighteenth century. Previous scholarship was based largely on studies of New England towns, which showed rates rising over the eighteenth century, eventually reaching high points where 30-40% of brides walked down the aisle pregnant. Scholars then used these findings to generalize about premarital rates and sexual behavior in all the colonies. My study calls into question those generalizations by showing how each Maryland church developed its own distinct pattern, all of which differ sharply from the New England model. My work also suggests that the different patterns of premarital pregnancy in the Maryland churches are likely attributable to a host of different factors, such as demography, changing laws, and the different ways colonies prosecuted sexual transgressions.