Once part of Northampton, the village of Easthampton was founded over three hunderd years ago with a land grant to John Webb, the first European settler. Situated along the Connecticut River, the settlement grew with the arrival of farmers and the emergence of sawmills. Continued expansion attracted more settlers and by 1785, Easthampton had become its own polital entity. Twenty-four years later, Easthampton was formally recognized as a town. The second half of the ninteenth century brought manufacturing to Easthampton. Textile mills and elastic production marked the transition from an agricultural settlement to an industrial community. Seeking employment, many immigrants relocated to Easthampton, thus creating the need for schools, banks, churches, and other institutions. The town continued to prosper through World War I. Many businesses have come and gone since those days. The arrival of the Stanley Home Products Company helped encourage an economic revitalization that returned stability to the community. In 1999, the town became a city. Today, the social and economic fabric of Easthampton continues to grow and strengthen.

How we make history--and what we then make of it--is engagingly dramatized in T. H. Breen's portrait of a 350-year-old American community faced with the costs of its “progress.” In the particulars of one town's struggle to check development and save its natural environment, Breen shows how our sense of history reflects our ever-changing self-perceptions and hopes for the future. Breen first went to East Hampton, the celebrated Long Island resort town, to write about the Mulford Farmstead, a picturesque saltbox dating from the 1680s. Through his research, he came across a fascinating cast of local characters, past and present, who contributed to, invented, and reinvented the town's history. Breen's work also drew him into contemporary local affairs: factionalism among residents, zoning disputes, and debates over resource management. Driving these heated issues, Breen found, were some dearly held notions about a harmonious, agrarian past that conflicted with what he had come to know about the divisiveness and opportunism of East Hampton's early days. Imagining the Past is about the interplay between some of the East Hampton histories Breen encountered: the “official” histories of many generations, the myths and oral traditions, and the curious stories that Breen, as an outsider, discerned in the town's rich holdings of artifacts and documents. With a warm yet wry regard for human nature, Breen obliges us to confront our pasts in all their complexities and ironies, no matter how unsettling or inconvenient the experience.