Nantucket

Nantucket is a Massachusetts island about 30 mi km 2 south of the Cape Cod peninsula. Nantucket Island, with an area of about 47.8 sqmi km2, is an important tourist destination and summer colony. Quotes When the expanse of more recently formed land on which Nantucket stood was submerged, Nantucket was insulated by the advance of the sea around it, and the other islands in the same chain—Martha's Vineyard, Long Island Long, Block Island Block, and Staten Islands—were similarly left standing in the ocean.Nantucket was, therefore, a terminal moraine—a halting-place of the glacial movement,—that is,it was formed by the advancing lower rim of the glacier which, melting, deposited its accumulation of Drift (geology) drift—sand, clay, and Boulder bowlders—caught up in its southward march, and frozen within its substance, in great heaps where they exist to-day as islands in the ocean. Robert Alexander Douglas-Lithgow, Nantucket; a History Putnam's 1914 9780598520289 https://books.google.com/books?id=GB8WAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA7 7 (389 pages) Nantucket is one of the last remaining authentic places in America. It has cobblestone streets and Quaker meetinghouses and no traffic lights and no chain stores. It also has fifty miles of pristine public beach. It's one of those places that people fall in love with because there is no place else like it. Elin Hilderbrandt, Interview July 2011 Chicklit Club https://www.chicklitclub.com/elinhilderbrand.html Since the island was settled, Nantucketers have been grappling with coastal hazards which, in many ways, are an accepted part of island life. Formed after the retreat of the Laurentide ice sheet, most of the island is composed of glacial outwash materials, including sand and gravel, which are especially prone to erosion ... Over time, Nantucketers have adapted to coastal hazards by moving lighthouses, homes, roads, utilities, and other structures away from the coastline in both managed (i.e., planned) and emergency situations. However, with climate change, coastal storms are increasing in frequency and intensity and erosion of the island’s bluffs, dunes, and beaches is becoming more rapid with sea level rise, bringing storm surge impacts to Nantucketers’ front doors and threatening their homes, infrastructure, and natural resources. Devon J. McKaye, Vincent Murphy, and Leah Hill, Retreat in real time—Nantucket’s balancing act along a changing coast Frontiers in Climate 7 2025 1510802 https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/climate/articles/10.3389/fclim.2025.1510802/full Social and political upheavals of the 1960s spurred many reactions in the arts, from optimistic modernism to nostalgic historicism, that resulted in a widespread revival of handcraft. On Nantucket, the 1960s craft revival coincided with a renaissance of the island itself, as it looked towards the past to shape its future. The wharf transformed and Heritage tourism historical tourism was promoted, the island a time capsule of its nineteenth-century glory days as a whaling port. In 1961, the Nantucket Historical Trust renovated the Jared Coffin House, a historic whaling merchant’s mansion turned hotel, decorating it with custom reproduction interior textiles. A weaving workshop was established, and the Nantucket Looms was born. While historicism is Nantucket’s trademark, a study of the Nantucket Looms in the 1960s reveals that modernism is equally apparent in Nantucket’s craft history. Jennifer Nieling, titlThe Nantucket Looms: Historicism and Modernism in an Island Cottage Industry Hidden Stories/Human Lives: Proceedings of the Textile Society of America 17th Biennial Symposium, October 15-17, 2020 https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/tsaconf/ 10.32873/unl.dc.tsasp.0120 ... in 1762, seventy-eight whalers cleared from American ports, of which more than half were from Nantucket. The year of 1766 saw 118 vessels, measuring 75 tons each on the average, clear from Nantucket alone. They brought home 11,969 barrels of Whale oil oil valued at $129,983. In 1770 the Nantucket fleet numbered 125 ships of the average size of 93 tons. During that year they took 14,331 barrels of oil worth $358,200.The ship owners of other ports, seeing Nantucket's prosperity, had tried to share in it. Their success was fairly good, but Nantucket owned at this time as many whale-ships as all the other ports of America combined. John Randolph Spears, The Story of the New England Whalers Macmillan 1908 https://books.google.com/books?id=jh9xYdhtVbIC&pg=PA70 70–71 (418 pages) See also Moby-Dick — In Herman Melville’s 1851 novel, the characters Captain Ahab and List_of_Moby-Dick_characters#Starbuck Starbuck are from Nantucket. External links Timeline of Nantucket Nantucket - A Film by Ric Burns (Original full-length film for the Nantucket Historical Association) October 29, 2024 nantuckethistory, YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NRGe4SHOcs (See Ric Burns.) Town of Nantucket website Category:Islands of North America Category:Geography of Massachusetts