Dryden's Second Hundred Years (Part I) chronicles life in a small farming village in Central New York during the first half of the twentieth century. But along with a close reading of the local scene-its telephones, roads, real and rumored milk strikes, and letters back home from the trenches of two wars-this narrative has a wide arc and rich texture: author Elizabeth Denver Gutchess dovetails local history with national and international events which shaped and countered it-as she explores connections and disconnections between this small community and the world at large. Essentially, in fact, Dryden's Second Hundred Years records a transformation of place, as Dryden's tightly woven social fabric slowly unraveled during the century, while ever-lengthening strands of road and cable reached farther and farther beyond this small hill-rimmed valley-weaving ever wider and more life-enhancing communities for the people who live here. At a time when the process of globalization outweighs all things local, however, it is important to keep balance. The global village, as many have warned, will be enriched not by neglecting the local but by taking care of it. One way to do that is simply to know and understand the local past. Like the body of fine work already produced by Dryden historians-and by local historians everywhere-this book might help us do that.

Dryden’s Second Hundred Years (Part II) does two exceptional things. First, its tight focus on local participation in World War II paradoxically chronicles the entire war, a conflict which drew its combatants from small rural townships like Dryden NY, assigned and scattered them throughout the world, and then delivered the survivors back home again, creating in every small American community a microcosm of the entire conflict, an eye-witnessing of the whole story. Second, that story is told here largely in local participants’ own words, in letters from camps, troopships, carriers, cruisers, foxholes, and hospitals, their voices a quiet backdrop to the horrific war they had been asked to fight. The resulting narrative suggests that those who don’t know history – while not always doomed to repeat it – are very likely doomed to live their lives without perspective, to mistake inconvenience for hardship, and hardship for catastrophe, and to be blind to the miracle of everyday normal life.