Ocean State Libraries

Polly's friendship with the wealthy Shaws of Boston helps them to build a new life and teaches her the truth about the relationship between happiness and riches.

The streets of Boston's North End, some laid out in the seventeenth century, exude a rich history built by every generation of Boston immigrants since 1630. Home to the Paul Revere House and the famous Old North Church, the North End appeals to locals as well as visitors with its bustling Haymarket and restaurant row.

Hailed by Henry James as "the finest piece of imaginative writing yet put forth in the country", Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter reaches to our nation's historical and moral roots for the material of great tragedy. Set in an early New England colony, the novel shows the terrible impact a single, passionate act has on the lives of three members of the community: the defiant Hester Prynne; the fiery, tortured Reverend Dimmesdale; and the obsessed,...

As a child, Lydia Pallas became all too familiar with uncertainty when it came to the future. Now, she's finally carved out a perfect life for herself - a life of stability and order. She adores her apartment overlooking bustling Boston Harbor, and her skill with languages has landed her a secure position as a translator for the U.S. Navy. Then Alexander Banebridge, who equally attracts and aggravates Lydia, hires her to translate seemingly innocuous...

In early colonial Massachusetts, a young woman endures the consequences of her sin of adultery and spends the rest of her life in atonement.

"Addie Baum is The Boston Girl, born in 1900 to immigrant parents who were unprepared for and suspicious of America and its effect on their three daughters. Growing up in the North End, then a teeming multicultural neighborhood, Addie's intelligence and curiosity take her to a world her parents can't imagine--a world of short skirts, movies, celebrity culture, and new opportunities for women. Addie wants to finish high school and dreams of going to...

The grand mansions and the elegant attached row houses of Beacon Street are the homes of Boston's elite and a backdrop for the city's long history. The iconic street is crowned with Charles Bullfinch's magnificent 1798 Massachusetts Statehouse overlooking the legendary Boston Common, where the British occupiers trained and cows once roamed freely. Historian Robert E. Guarino deftly narrates the development of the street, from its expansion as land...

The Back Bay was one of Boston's premier residential neighborhoods between 1837 and 1901. From its quagmire beginnings and with the creation of the Boston Public Garden in the 1830s, the Back Bay was envisioned as an urbane and sophisticated streetscape of stone and brick row houses. The major center of the neighborhood became Art Square, now known as Copley Square, which was surrounded by Trinity Church, New Old South Church, Second Church of Boston,...