Cape Cod

This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design. Henry C. Kittredge's Cape Cod is a richly detailed portrait of a region shaped by ice, surf, memory, and work. Framed by affectionate family praise and the testimony of local residents, archivists, and descendants, it blends scholarship with intimate local knowledge to create a vivid history of place. The book ranges from the Cape's geological origins and shifting barrier beaches to Native life, early exploration, settlement, colonial conflict, religion, wrecks, trade, whaling, fisheries, the Civil War, and the canal, with illustrations that reinforce its documentary depth. Kittredge explains Cape Cod as a landscape carved by glaciers, altered by wind and tide, and continually remade by the sea. He traces the loss of its once-dense forests, the rise of a maritime culture after reckless timber cutting, and the skeptical sorting of legend from history. The narrative also captures the Cape's lively local life, from lyceums and verse to Provincetown's desperate battle against drifting dunes and its uneasy legal status as state-owned land. Throughout, the book reveals a coast where nature and human effort are always in tension.