The Books page has been updated!

Here are the books just added to the Books page of HartfordHistory.net:

• "Connecticut in the American Civil War: Slavery, Sacrifice, and Survival," by Matt Warshauer, published in 2011 by the Wesleyan University Press;
  
• "Hidden History of Connecticut," by Wilson Faude, published in 2010 by The History Press;
  
• "William Gillette, America's Sherlock Holmes, by Henry Zecher, published in 2011 by Xlibris;
  
• "Remembering the Old Neighborhood: Stories from Hartford's North End," edited by Joan Walden, published in 2009 by the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Hartford; and
  
• "Puritan Parker: Historical Narrative of Sergeant William Parker, One of the Founders of Hartford, Connecticut and a Veteran of the Pequot Indian War of 1637," by Bernard S. Parker, published in 2011 by CreateSpace.

They join another work added earlier:

• "Crowbar Governor: The Life and Times of Morgan Gardner Bulkeley," by Kevin Murphy, published in 2011 by Wesleyan University Press.

If you know of any other books concerning city history that came out in the past year but haven’t appeared on the Books page yet, let me know.

In case you wondered about 'Ann Uccello Street'

On Interstate 84 eastbound through the city, the Exit 49 sign used to read "Ann Street." Last fall, it was changed to "Ann Uccello Street," to reflect the renaming of the street after Uccello, who in 1967 became not only the first female mayor in the city's history but also the first woman to become mayor of a major U.S. city. She's also the last Republican to serve as mayor of Hartford.

WFSB-TV still has video of the renaming ceremony, including some of Uccello's remarks, on its website. At 86, Uccello is still going strong. For more on her, visit her bio page on the Connecticut Women's Hall of Fame website.

And who was the original "Ann" of Ann Street? According to the very authoritative "History of Hartford Streets" by F. Perry Close (1969, Connecticut Historical Society), it was "(n)amed after Ann Sheldon Goodwin by her sons, James and Nathanial Goodwin, who opened the street through their land in 1814." Originally, the street ran from Main Street to Church Street. Eventually, it was extended southward to Jewell Street.

An excellent idea

On his WTIC-AM talk show this afternoon, Colin McEnroe offered a great idea for reviving downtown Hartford: build a museum dedicated to the written word. Sure, we're already building a science museum -- but so is every other city, he noted. A written-word museum would not only make Hartford unique, he said, but it would also allow the region to draw on its long heritage of great authors, like Mark Twain, Noah Webster, Wallace Stevens, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. McEnroe described a museum where visitors would learn about everything from the Gutenberg press to the latest developments in computing. He also spoke of making the building distinctive by designing it to look like a letter of the alphabet. That's fine too, but I'd be reluctant to enter a building shaped like the letter "V." Colin McEnroe's blog

Things on my plate in '08 and books of '07

Happy new year! Among my resolutions: to thoroughly overhaul wwww.hartfordhistory.net and blog more regularly. On the latter score, I never got around last year to mentioning the publication of several books that deal in one way or another with city history. So I'll take the opportunity to list them here:

• "The Hartford Whalers" is another addition to Arcadia Publishing's indispensable series, Images in History. This pictorial tribute to "The Whale," put together by Brian Codagnone, traces the team's history from its membership in the upstart World Hockey League to its absorbtion into the National Hockey League, which eventually allowed the team to move to -- ugh! -- North Carolina. Relive the fun and heartbreak.
  
  
• "Victorian Hartford Revisited," another Arcadia photo book, is Tomas Nenortas's follow-up to his "Victorian Hartford," a compilation of postcards from Hartford's days as one of America's wealthiest and most beautiful cities. According to Arcadia, this volume contains "many never-before-published images."
  
  
• "House of Good Hope: A Promise for a Broken City," tells the true story of five gifted Hartford boys who met as high school athletes and promised to stay in the city and work for its improvement. Intertwined with it is author Michael Downs' soul searching over whether to remain in Hartford, the scene of so much of his family's history. The book is published by the University of Nebraska Press.
  
  
• "Girls of Tender Age: A Memoir" actually appeared at the end of 2005, but I can't resist plugging this amazing book, which has since been published in paperback. Author Mary-Ann Tirone Smith uses the 1953 murder of an 11-year-old classmate as a spur to explore her Hartford childhood, which included living with an autistic brother who could not bear many everyday sounds -- this in a time when autism was little recognized, let alone understood. Those nostalgic for the kinder, gentler Hartford of the 1950s will find lots of fodder here, but Smith also dissects the repressive mindset that led the adults around her to all but pretend the death of her friend never happened. Smith's experience as a mystery writer shows too, as she gives a riveting, step-by-step account of the movements that brought her friend into the path of her killer. This is an absolute page-turner.