Maine Historical Society - Programs Podcast

Speaker: Joseph Conforti; Recorded October 17, 2013 - Joe Conforti, Distinguished Professor of American and New England Studies Emeritus at the University of Southern Maine, gives his first talk in Maine about his memoir, Another City Upon a Hill . The book is both a personal story and a portrait of a distinctive New England place--Fall River, Massachusetts, once the cotton cloth capital of America. Conforti, whose mother was Portuguese and father was Italian, recounts how he negotiated those identities in a city where ethnic heritage mattered. Simultaneously, he shares the multi-generational story of these immigrants groups making their way in a once mighty textile city that had fallen on hard times beginning in the 1920s. Conforti is the author of five books, including Saints and Strangers: New England in British North America and the acclaimed Imagining New England .