The North Adams Shoe Manufacturers: How They Created a Successful Industry Only to Abandon It, Senior Thesis, Matthew S. Bryson
Images of America: North Adams, Robert Campanile
The Chinese in America, Iris Chang
The Chinese of America, Jack Chen
A Son of China, Sheng Cheng
History of the Temperance Reform in Massachusetts 1813–1883, George Faber Clark
The Forging of a New Mill Town: North and South Adams, Massachusetts, 1780–1860, Dissertation, Timothy Christopher Coogan II
Berkshire County, Rollin Hillyer Cooke, ed.
History of the Hoosac Tunnel, Orson Dalrymple
Recollections, Washington Gladden
Women’s Letters: America from the Revolutionary War to the Present, Lisa Grunwald and Steven J. Adler, eds.
Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act, Andrew Gyory
Berkshire: Two Hundred Years in Pictures, 1761–1961, Richard V. Happel, Robert B. Kimball, and William H. Tague
The American Note-books, Nathaniel Hawthorne
A Gazetteer of Massachusetts, John Hayward
The Organization of the Boot and Shoe Industry in Massachusetts Before 1875, Blanche Evans Hazard
The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans as Told by Themselves, Hamilton Holt
The Chinese American Family Album, Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler
Stories from Our Hills, Jean Jarvie
A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837, Paul E. Johnson
Chinese America: The Untold Story of America’s Oldest New Community, Peter Kwong and Dušanka Miščević
A New England Girlhood, Lucy Larcom
An Early Vermont Sampler, Marion B. Lawrence
A Shoemaker’s Story: Being Chiefly about French Canadian Immigrants, Enterprising Photographers, Rascal Yankees, and Chinese Cobblers in a Nineteenth-Century Factory Town, Anthony W. Lee
The Knights of St. Crispin, 1867–1874, Don D. Lescohier
The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder, Miscegenation, and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-of-the-Century New York City, Mary Ting Yi Lui
Clarksburg, Massachusetts, Then and Now, 1749–1962, Ethel Mae Marsden
An Illustrated History of the Chinese in America, Ruthanne Lum McCunn
Chinese American Portraits: Personal Histories 1828–1988, Ruthanne Lum McCunn
“Celestials” in a Shoe Factory: Middle Class, Labor, and the Chinese in North Adams, Massachusetts, 1870–1880, Senior Thesis, Benjamin T. Metcalf
The Unwelcome Immigrant: The American Image of the Chinese, 1785–1882, Stuart Creighton Miller
Plant Wizard: The Life of Lue Gim Gong, Marian Murray
History of the North Adams Baptist Church, 1808–1878, A. C. Osborn
Old-World Questions and New-World Answers, Daniel Pidgeon
North Adams and Vicinity, Illustrated, H. G. Rowe and C. T. Fairfield, eds.
Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865, Mary P. Ryan
A Candlestick in this Place: History of the First Baptist Church, North Adams, Massachusetts, Doris M. Sanford
Telling Travels: Selected Writings by Nineteenth-Century American Women Abroad, Mary Suzanne Schriber, ed.
History of Massachusetts Industries: Their Inception, Growth, and Success, Orra L. Stone
Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans, Ronald Takaki
Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19th-Century America, Ronald Takaki
A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America, Ronald Takaki
New York before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776–1882, John Kuo Wei Tchen
The Path to Mechanized Shoe Production in the United States, Ross Thomson
America in 1876: The Way We Were, Lally Weymouth
The Gunpowder Mills of Maine, Maurice M. Whitten
The Silent Traveller in London, Chiang Yee
History of Berkshire County, Massachusetts: With Biographical Sketches of its Prominent Men, Thomas Cushing
“Calvin Sampson’s Chinese Experiment,” Yankee, Brent Filson
“The Knights of St. Crispin in Massachusetts, 1869–1878,” The Journal of Economic History, John Philip Hall
“The Shaping of Values in Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts: The Case of Henry L. Dawes,” Historical Journal of Massachusetts, Fred H. Nicklason
“Asian Pioneers in the Eastern United States: Chinese Cutlery Workers in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, in the 1870s,” Journal of Asian American Studies, Edward J. M. Rhoads
“Chinamen in Yankeedom: Anti-Unionism in Massachusetts in 1870,” The American Historical Review, Frederick Rudolph
“Calvin T. Sampson,” New England Manufacturers and Manufactories, J. D. Van Slyck
“The Sampson Family,” The Giles Memorial, John Adams Vinton
North Adams, Mass. Troy Daily Times Presses
North Adams: Old Home Week, 1909
Early Life and Customs of Berkshire County from Collections of the Berkshire Historical and Scientific Society, 1892
1753–1953: Commemorating the 200th Anniversary of the Founding of Stamford, Vermont
The Berkshire Hills, Federal Writer’s Project of the WPA for Massachusetts, 1939
Records of the Bureau of Statistics of Labor, 1870
Interrogation Transcript of Charles T. Sing
Interrogation Transcript of George D. Sing
Many local and national newspapers of the time, especially the Adams Transcript (now the North Adams Transcript) and the Hoosac Valley News.
Acknowledgements
For all kinds of assistance at all kinds of times: Talia Mailman and Payap Padkeelao; Kacy Westwood and Jason Clark; Kevin Scott Wong; Barbara Lane and Erica Mae Peterson; Justin Adkins; Barry Goldstein; George and Nancy Parrino. And especially Anthony W. Lee.
Any historical inaccuracies are my responsibility, as are, of course, the historical liberties I’ve taken in the name of fiction.
For early and crucial readings: Andrea Barrett, Sandra Leong, Marsha Recknagel, and Eric Simonoff.
For rigorous and generous later help: all the folks at Tin House Books, but especially Lee Montgomery, Nanci McCloskey, Rob Spillman, and Meg Storey.
For my children: Aidan, Emmett, and Lucy.
And, as always and for everything: my husband, Jim Shepard.
KAREN SHEPARD is a Chinese American born and raised in New York City. She is the author of three novels, An Empire of Women, The Bad Boy’s Wife, and Don’t I Know You? Her short fiction has been published in the Atlantic Monthly, Tin House, and Ploughshares, and her nonfiction has appeared in More, Self, USA Today, and the Boston Globe. She teaches writing and literature at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where she lives.
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