More than a decade ago, two UNH professors set out to do something no one else had ever dared attempt. They set out to define New England—to tell the story of an entire region. The project they envisioned was massive. It would encompass the past, the present and the future. It would explore people and places, traditions and technology. It would shatter a few myths. It would be called The Encyclopedia of New England.

Thirteen years and 1.6 million words later, Burt Feintuch and David Watters have compiled a book that celebrates and documents New England's unique regional history and culture—and proves the tourist brochures wrong. There's more to New England, it turns out, than maple syrup and fall foliage, stone walls and pastoral landscapes, historic houses and Mayflower descendents. "Perhaps," says Feintuch, chuckling, "we should consider the encyclopedia an act of resistance." Not that the two are curmudgeons, really. But the image of "ye olde New England" just isn't accurate, they argue. "The old Norman Rockwell image endures," says Watters, "but it's more complicated than that. There's a very different story to be told."

The encyclopedia tells this new—and complicated—story in a series of 1,300 entries organized into 22 sections covering topics from politics and religion to folklife and ideas. The entries and essays are quite diverse in their approaches, notes Watters. "They provide different ways to think about various subjects. And when you put them all together, you enter into a wonderful conversation about what New England means."

Early on, at least one publisher expressed interest in producing the encyclopedia as a multi-volume reference series. "Something that would cost around $300," says Feintuch. But Watters and Feintuch were convinced that the encyclopedia should be a single-volume coffee-table book that people—not just libraries—would buy and use. It also had to be scholarly. When Yale University Press agreed to take on the project, the editors knew they'd found the right home for the book. "The press carries with it a reputation for fine scholarship and accuracy," says Watters.

Just weeks before the fall release of the book that has consumed their lives for so long, Watters and Feintuch still can't quite believe that it's over. Only months earlier, they were working late into the night checking hundreds of facts. They reviewed name spellings and birth dates, places and descriptions. They made last-minute calls to reference librarians, e-mailed contributors and "googled" their way through a list of minute details. And even then, it still wasn't quite over. "I remember the very last panicked e-mail," says Watters. The editors at Yale had found a few final discrepancies. They needed answers by the next morning. Watters dropped everything to track down the missing information.

For years it's been this way. In the midst of careers already filled with teaching, research and public service, Watters and Feintuch have repeatedly dropped everything to bring to fruition a project they believe has been long overdue. "If 'region' is a state of mind," says Feintuch, "New England is arguably America's first and most enduring example." Yet there was nothing on our national bookshelf to attest to this fact, to celebrate and define a region many consider the heart and spiritual soul of the country. And so Watters and Feintuch plunged in. Along the way, the project became a labor of love. Research, family time, sleep—all these things were put aside in the effort to fill the gap in the nation's bookshelf.

"It's been part of our annual report for years," notes Feintuch, director of UNH's Center for the Humanities. "Each year, we'd say it was getting closer." This year, finally, the editors will include in their report the word they have long hoped to write: Done. The Encyclopedia of New England is on sale at last, a hefty, hard-bound volume at an affordable price ($65 in bookstores, less online), just as its editors first envisioned. And everyone who cracks the cover becomes part of the conversation about what New England is and why it matters.

Even casual readers flipping through a few of the encyclopedia's 1,600 pages will inevitably stumble on some of the surprising facts and intriguing tidbits that season this text—and prove that New England can't be stereotyped. The history of PEZ candy. A vacation spot known as "Sneezer's Paradise." A Turkish cymbal-making company. The great cookie controversy. The state that declared war on Nazi Germany in 1941, before Pearl Harbor. The divination properties of the apple. The sports invented in New England. The percentage of New Englanders who can claim English ancestry. The one state with a majority Catholic population. The dubious connection between tuberculosis and vampires. The folktale of the jumping doughnuts.

Readers also encounter numerous entries detailing New England's conflicts and complexities. In 1927, for example, during the nationwide anticommunist and anti-immigrant frenzy known as the Red Scare, two Italian immigrants, Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco, were accused and convicted of murder—and ultimately executed for their alleged crime. Scholars today still debate whether the two were guilty. The encyclopedia's account of the trial includes Vanzetti's moving words: "Never in our full life, could we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man's understanding of man as now we do by an accident...The taking of our lives—lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish peddler... That last moment belongs to us—that agony is our triumph." The trial, concludes the entry, "continues to remind Americans how fragile constitutional rights can be in times of extreme national hysteria."

Accounts like these offer poignant examples of the need to retell the stories of our past—even those that are painful. "Culture is not always pretty," says Watters, who directs UNH's Center for New England Culture. But a reexamination of the past, including its intolerances and tensions, has something to teach us about today. It helps us to remember. And the importance of memory, says Watters is "a defining characteristic of New England. Without memory, the sense of communal purpose can easily be lost, and with it, community, spiritual growth, prosperity and history itself." The encyclopedia is one weapon in the arsenal of fighting forgetfulness.

Feintuch, who came to UNH in 1988 from Western Kentucky University, had contributed to the award-winning Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. "I thought it would be great to sponsor something like that here," he says. So he and Watters began looking for publishers. "Everyone told us to get the money together first," says Feintuch. "They suggested about a million dollars." The two forged ahead anyway. Along with support from UNH, the encyclopedia eventually received substantial funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. "I am especially pleased that your encyclopedia will carefully explore both the older Yankee culture and the more recent ethnic and black traditions that have shaped New England life," wrote William Ferris, then-director of the NEH. "These diverse, complex worlds will offer an important new understanding of New England."

Feintuch and Watters are especially proud of the encyclopedia's emphasis on the richness of New England's ethnic traditions. There are photos of Latin American children in traditional Sunday dress, Vietnamese children at a New Year's celebration, African American children staging the Black Nativity. There are photos of a Micmac craftsman, a mural in Chinatown and an Armenian family in traditional dress. Every immigrant group is represented and the role they played in the region's development is acknowledged. "We were very self-conscious about the fact that the image of New England had always been a white image," says Watters. "We wanted everybody to find themselves in this book—in stories of their communities and their cultures and in the pictures themselves."

This inclusive approach characterizes every section of the encyclopedia, which takes very seriously its role in helping to preserve the culture it defines. "There is a crying need to document New England's everyday life and its folklife," writes Watters, "to preserve the cultural record and history, as well as the region's contemporary culture." Not an easy task, certainly, but just the thing for UNH, according to Feintuch and Watters. "It's the type of thing you find at a land grant institution that cares about the world," says Feintuch, "and it's very much in keeping with our mission."

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."

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."

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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