"This is a loving memorial - in text and pictures - to thirteen New England houses and the persons who lived in them. Some are magnificent architectural showpieces, like Gore Place in Waltham, Mass., and the John Brown House in Providence, while others are modest clapboard structures that housed gentler, and often more famous ersonalities. But all of them are valued legacies from the American past." The houses include: Adamses at Quincy, MA; Louisa May Alcott at Concord, MA; Bishop Berkeley at Whitehall, Newport, RI; Anne Bradstreet in North Andover, MA; John Brown at Providence, RI; Emily Dickinson at Amherst, MA; Christopher Gore at Waltham, MA; Emerson, Hawthorne at The Old Manse, Concord MA; Sarah Orne Jewett at South Berwick, ME; Longfellow at Craigie House, Cambridge, MA; Lowell's Elmwood in Cambridge, MA; Maria Mitchell on Nantucket Island, MA; Paul Revere House in Boston, MA.