". . . a well-written and enjoyable book that says much about the making of the United States."
—William David Barry, Maine Sunday Telegram

"Through the revealing prism of the Vickerys and their town, Andrea Hawkes astutely illuminates the power of both place and of family heritage in the making of Maine's culture."
—Alan Taylor, Professor of History at University of California at Davis; author of Liberty Men and Great Proprietors and William Cooper's Town, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

With the story of one American family the Vickerys of Unity, Maine Andrea Hawkes tells the history of our country and explores the power of connections, beginning with the first generation of Vickerys from England who founded Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1634, then following the fifth generation to the District of Maine just before the American Revolution as they extended the family network from Cape Elizabeth, east to Calais, and north to Unity where succeeding generations thrived for the next two hundred years. In the late 1800s the ninth generation of Vickerys expanded the family network in Maine across the United States to the Montana and Wyoming borderlands, and their stories of pioneer ranching and mining mirror the entrepreneurial spirit of their colonial ancestors.

Drawing in part from the extensive genealogical research of the late James B. Vickery III, Hawkes shapes a continuum of family stories that is richly peopled and finely detailed. From peril and tragedy in Puritan fishing communities, to "following a trail of spotted trees through the woods" to Unity, to the experiences and attitudes of women on remote sheep ranches in Montana, Hawkes keeps a keen historian's eye on the facts while weaving a fascinating tale.

Andrea Constantine Hawkes is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Maine. Her specialty is nineteenth-century United States history, as well as New England regional and women's studies. She co-edited The Civil War Recollections of General Ellis Spear, and edited and wrote an interpretative essay for The Lighthouse Keeper's Wife, the autobiography of Connie Scovill Small.