A full house on Wednesday evening at the Essex Shipbuilding Museum’s Waterline Center.
A talk by Robert Booth…
“When Salem Ruled the World, 1790-1830”
Most readers know Salem only for the city’s notorious witch trials. But years later it became a very different city, one that produced America’s first millionaire (still one of history’s 75 wealthiest men) and boasted a maritime trade that made it the country’s richest city. Westward expansion and the industrial revolution would eventually erode Salem’s political importance, but it was a shocking murder and the scandal that followed which led at last to its fall from national prominence.
Robert Booth, a native of Marblehead, Massachusetts, grew up on salt water, racing sailboats, and working as a lobsterman. He is an authority on historic architecture and maritime culture, having reasearched the histories of hundreds of houses and their occupants, from Nantucket to Maine. He helped to rescue America’s last surviving Revolutionary War privateering base, which was moved from Marblehead to Derby Wharf in the Salem Maritime Historic Site, a federal park devoted to seafaring. He works as executive director of the Center for Clinical Social Work, a national advocacy and education association for members of the largest mental-health-care profession in the country. His guidebook, Boston’s Freedom Trail, has stayed in print for nearly thirty years, and he writes about history for the online version of The Boston Globe. He is Curator Emeritus of the Pickering House (1664) of Salem and is the founding director of the online Salem History Society. He resides in Marblehead with his wife and children.
Booth’s latest book…
Death of an Empire: The Rise and Murderous Fall of Salem,
America’s Richest City (Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martin’s Press, 2011)
“A complex and well-researched yarn, Death of an Empire chronicles the little-known history of this relatively brief period of wealth and good fortune for a Massachusetts seafaring center, along with its economic downfall amid the rise of industrialization in the United States. It also recounts a lethal conspiracy and scandal that robbed Salem of whatever remaining luster was left after the city’s golden age. Booth, a local historian – and sometime lobsterman – grew up in Marblehead and knows the territory of which he writes with authority.”
–The Boston Globe
http://www.amazon.com/Death-Empire-Murderous-Americas-Richest/dp/product-description/0312540388
Good Morning Gloucester 