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In the summer of 2004, 12 years after the encyclopedia project had begun, Feintuch and Watters stood on a balcony inside the historic church-turned-library that houses the editorial staff at the Yale press and looked down on the scene below. The encyclopedia had reached the final editing stages. A table big enough to seat 30 was entirely covered with the pages of the encyclopedia, carefully stacked in piles. Yellow sticky notes were everywhere, marking changes and questions. A dozen editors were bent over the text, red pencils in hand, reading and marking. "That's when it really hit me," says Feintuch, "how big this project was."

Playing bocce in Boston's North End.

Rolling logs down skids, West Swanzey, N.H., 1942.

Immigrants arriving in Boston, ca. 1920.

Susan Laity, senior manuscript editor and coordinating editor for reference at Yale, is used to stacks of paper. She pores over manuscripts day after day. But she'll never forget the day the encyclopedia arrived in her office. "It was huge—the biggest thing to cross my desk," she says. The 3,000-page manuscript stood three feet high. By the time the book went to press, Laity had four three-foot high drafts crowding her office. She had read every word of each one of them. So had Feintuch and Watters—several times.

"Here's how it worked," says Watters, ticking off the sequence of events that repeated itself over and over as Watters and Feintuch steered a project that included nearly 1,000 contributors. "A manuscript would come in on disk. It needed to be put into the database, archived and edited. Facts had to be checked. It would go to the section editor to make sure the scholarship was thorough and to determine if more words were needed. Then we'd correspond with the writer, sending a revised copy for discussion and approval," says Watters. "Then the manuscript editor would revise it, according to the encyclopedia style sheet. It would get edited again by Burt or me. Later, it would go on to Yale, where it would be read by the copy editing team there—and more changes would be made."

Carl Yastrzemski, 1983

For years, it went on like this: finding qualified contributors, collecting manuscripts, corresponding with writers, meeting with section editors. Read. Revise. Read again. Watters and Feintuch praise the project's managing editor, Suzanne Guiod, who kept the endless revisions on track, as well as their team of section editors, a number of whom came from UNH—Jeff Bolster, Charles Clark, Barbara White, Bob Macheski, John Carroll. "These are some of the best scholars working in the field," says Watters. "They really did an important job and reflect the strength of scholarship here at UNH."

Toward the very end of the project, as the encyclopedia was nearly ready to go to press, it became harder and harder to turn on the news each morning. "Events kept happening," says Laity, "and we'd always be thinking, 'Oh, we should put that in, we should add that fact.' At some point, we just had to say, the deadline is past." And then the Red Sox won the World Series. The pages were set, the entries edited. But the bat-swinging heroes who made baseball history simply could not be left out. With some painstaking editing, the editors managed to wedge into the already-full pages one of the greatest plot twists in the story of New England, and Curt Schilling and the rest of the gang made it in.

When the underdogs of the baseball world finally won, after years of losing, they proved something that the two editors of The Encyclopedia of New England have believed all along. The Red Sox proved that it matters where you're from. In a world leaning more and more toward globalization, and at a time when many argue that the local is less and less relevant, people continue to make sense of their lives by remembering and retelling stories of their hometown. These stories don't obliterate our differences. They don't erase the complexities or the cultural textures that define and differentiate us. But they offer enduring proof that something else unites us: place still matters. ~

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