From sports to politics, food to finance, aviation to engineering, to bitter disputes over simple boundaries themselves, New England's feuds have peppered the region's life for centuries. They've been raw and rowdy, sometimes high minded and humorous, and in a place renowned for its deep sense of history, often long-running and legendary. There are even some that will undoubtedly outlast the region's ancient low stone walls. Ted Reinstein, a native New Englander and local writer, offers us fascinating stories, some known, others not so much, from the history of New England in this fun, accessible book. Bringing to life many of the fights, spats, and arguments that have, in many ways, shaped the area itself, Reinstein demonstrates what it really means to be Wicked Pissed.

In the April of 1945, exactly two years before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in major league baseball, liberal Boston City Councilman Izzy Muchnick persuaded the Red Sox to try out three black players in return for a favorable vote to allow the team to play on Sundays. The Red Sox got the councilman's much-needed vote, but the tryout was a sham; the three players would get no closer to the major leagues. It was a lost battle in a war that was ultimately won by Robinson in 1947. This book tells the story of the little-known heroes who fought segregation in baseball, from communist newspaper reporters to the Pullman car porters who saw to it that black newspapers espousing integration in professional sports reached the homes of blacks throughout the country. It also reminds us that the first black player in professional baseball was not Jackie Robinson but Moses Fleetwood Walker in 1884, and that for a time integrated teams were not that unusual. And then, as segregation throughout the country hardened, the exclusion of blacks in baseball quietly became the norm, and the battle for integration began anew.

Explore the fabric of America over hot coffee and penny candy. Step through the wooden doors of a New England general store and step back in time, into a Norman Rockwell painting and into the heart of America. New England's General Stores offers a nostalgic picture of this colonial staple and, fortunately, steadfast institution of small towns from Connecticut to Maine. This is where children of each generation take their first allowance to buy their very own penny candy. Locals have swapped stories at these counters from gossip to whispers of revolution. In tough times, the general store treated customers like family, extending credit when no one else would. Stubborn as New Englanders themselves, the general store has refused to become a mere sentimental relic of an earlier age.

Like the American South, New England is one of those few regions that have long-enjoyed a popular and enduring hold on the larger nation. Culturally, politically, geographically, it is a place apart. Some of this uniqueness owes no doubt to New England's place in American history: the first colonies, the founding, the first forays into battle and true independence. It's old. It's age shows everywhere, from those battle roads, to three-hundred year-old barns and buildings, to equally old, low stone walls that thread through the woods and meadows of ancient pastures like a nation's rocky varicose veins. In politics, in literature, in popular culture, the six-state region of America's northeast helped define much of where the nation is today. Sure, the history is pervasive. The lure of Concord and Lexington is real and that "shot heard 'round the world' still reverberates. (Ironically, between Concord and Lexington, who've never stopped the shots across each other's historical bows.) The Cape and its sandy, salt-air specialness along the Atlantic still enchants. (Just not for actual Cape Codders, who view Summer's tourist onslaught as only slightly more bearable than locusts. Slightly.) The smaller, rural villages with their tidy commons and cozy general stores still remind visitors of things rooted and precious. (Too precious, if you ask some of the villagers.) And those scenic little, buoy-festooned lobster shacks along the rugged Maine coast? Still packing 'em in for the steamed and buttery essence of New England. (An essence that, as of this writing, was costing a family of four about $150. Maybe not so essential after all?) Sure that history and that mountains-meet-the-sea geography is iconic and broadly-enjoyed. But it's not what's most essential about New England. It's not what continues to define it. And as a journalist, it's certainly not what has continued to draw me all over its six states in search of stories for over twenty years now. It's the people. (And really, isn't it everywhere?) You can only report so often about development on the Cape, the price of lobster, or how tough it is to keep an old general store open. A covered bridge has little to say about how it was built or the floods they've survived. But people do. Especially that one person who's one of the last to possess the craft and old-school knowledge necessary to build one.