Excerpt from Catalogue of the Nevins Memorial Library, Methuen, Massachusetts, 1887 Abbott, John Stevens Cabot, continued. Miles Standish, captain of the pilgrims. Illustrated. New York. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

A combined and indexed edition of "Recollections of Sixty Years in Methuen" and "Recollections of Civil War," historical addressed read before the Methuen Historical Society in 1905. William Barnes was born on March 15, 1834, in Orford, NH; his family moved to Methuen when he was 11 years old. At 27 years old, Barnes a married man with 4 children, joined the 1st Massachusetts Heavy Artillery and fought in ten battles in a span of three months during the civil war. He worked in a Methuen hat factory for over thirty years, and as janitor of the new Nevins Memorial Library for eighteen years after that. He wrote these essays shortly after his retirement in 1905. William Barnes died tragically in a fall at the Odd Fellows building, on February 5, 1913. His recollections of Methuen are an integral part of all Methuen historical research.

Since 1980, the number of people in U.S. prisons has increased more than 450%. Despite a crime rate that has been falling steadily for decades, California has led the way in this explosion, with what a state analyst called "the biggest prison building project in the history of the world." Golden Gulag provides the first detailed explanation for that buildup by looking at how political and economic forces, ranging from global to local, conjoined to produce the prison boom. In an informed and impassioned account, Ruth Wilson Gilmore examines this issue through statewide, rural, and urban perspectives to explain how the expansion developed from surpluses of finance capital, labor, land, and state capacity. Detailing crises that hit California’s economy with particular ferocity, she argues that defeats of radical struggles, weakening of labor, and shifting patterns of capital investment have been key conditions for prison growth. The results—a vast and expensive prison system, a huge number of incarcerated young people of color, and the increase in punitive justice such as the "three strikes" law—pose profound and troubling questions for the future of California, the United States, and the world. Golden Gulag provides a rich context for this complex dilemma, and at the same time challenges many cherished assumptions about who benefits and who suffers from the state’s commitment to prison expansion.