CONCORD, NH--TWO of the three articles included in the just-released Summer 2015 issue of the statewide history magazine Historical New Hampshire feature stories of New Hampshire women. Both will be of interest, however, to all those who care about our state's history, no matter their gender. Hannah Duston is certainly a name well-known to all. Yet as one local historian wrote in the mid-1900s, "Fact and folklore have become so confused in retelling the narrative [of her escape from captivity] that the average adult today wonders if it really happened." In a ground-breaking study entitled "Following in Hannah Duston's Footsteps: Reexamining the Evidence," Denise Ortakales of Laconia takes a new look at previously unquestioned dates and presumed "facts." Using published and manuscript accounts written by New Englanders taken by their native captors to Canada, the author fleshes out the story, making it more credible, while at the same time showing that much of what is taken for granted is undocumented. This article, and a related book which the author is working on, are likely to become the definitive works on this subject and remain so for some time to come.  

Unlike the lead article, which questions long-standing beliefs about a well-known New Hampshire figure, the second article introduces a group of all-but-forgotten women from New Hampshire and Boston. In "Sarah Low and 'The Bostonians': Social Networks of Civil War Nurses in Wartime Washington, D.C.," Katelynn Vance re-creates the day-to-day world of a group of New England women who served as nurses in the nation's capital during the Civil War. She does so by studying their letters, with emphasis on those of Sarah Low of Dover in the New Hampshire Historical Society's collections. The author's focus is on the importance of the women's social networks, both at home and in Washington, in all aspects of their wartime lives, influencing how they obtained their hospital positions, how they procured supplies, ranging from bandages to reading material for the recuperating soldiers, and how they found respite from their work in the wards.