By the turn of the twentieth century, racing for the America's Cup was no longer simply a gentleman's game. Fraught with danger and political tension, the contest for the Cup had become a showcase of technological innovation and national grit. In 1903, the fabulously wealthy tea tycoon, Sir Thomas Lipton, gave Britain's most celebrated naval architects carte blanche to produce Shamrock III. In response, the American designer Nathanael G. Herreshoff built Reliance, a defender that was so big and bold-carrying more canvas than any single-masted vessel ever before-that it ushered in a new era of naval architecture and fundamentally shaped the future of the America's Cup. From conception to construction, through hair-raising sea trials to the grand finale of a race like no other, this beautiful and dangerous vessel comes to life in Temple to the Wind, one of the most exciting sailing stories ever told.

One of the largest estuaries on the North Atlantic coast, Narragansett Bay served as a gateway for colonial expansion in the seventeenth century and the birthplace of American industrialization in the late eighteenth. Christopher Pastore presents an environmental history of this watery corner of the Atlantic world, beginning with the first European settlement in 1636 and ending with the dissolution of the Blackstone Canal Company in 1849. Between Land and Sea "traces how the Bay s complex ecology shaped the contours of European habitation, trade, and resource use, and how littoral settlers in turn reconfigured the physical and cultural boundaries between humans and nature.

Narragansett Bay emerges in Pastore s account as much more than a geological formation. Rather, he reimagines the nexus of land and sea as a brackish borderland shaped by the tension between what English settlers saw as improvable land and the perpetual forces of the North Atlantic Ocean. By draining swamps, damming rivers, and digging canals, settlers transformed a marshy coastal margin into a clearly defined edge. The resultant coastline proved less resilient, less able to absorb the blows of human initiative and natural variation than the soggy fractal of water and earth it replaced.

Today, as sea levels rise and superstorms batter coasts with increasing ferocity, Between Land and Sea" calls on the environmentally-minded to make a space in their notions of progress for impermanence and uncertainty in the natural world."