One of our most successful One Book One Community selections was Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919. 

Stephen Puleo visits Bridgewater

The highlight of the Dark Tide read was a visit to Bridgewater State University by author Stephen Puleo.

Around the Common

The Bridgewater blog "Around the Common" featured a post about Dark Tide to help promote our Molasses Cookie Contest.

Bridgewater and Raynham Share Community Wide Read

In the spring of 2011 the neighboring town of Raynham joined Bridgewater in reading Dark Tide. 

Molasses Cookie Contest

Four Town Councilors were the judges for the 18 entries in the Molasses Cookie Contest to kick off Bridgewater's One Book One Community Read of Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919, by Stephen Puleo. The Bridgewater Independent covered the event.

The winning recipes are shared here

Dark Tide Lesson Plans

In the spring of 2011, the One Book One Community selection was Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919. A highlight of the semester was the campus visit by Stephen Puleo, a public intellectual who brings together diligent research and perceptive analysis with a gift for story-telling.

As I have done most spring semesters since the One Book partnership began, I used Dark Tide as a text for an upper-level course I teach for future geography teachers. Because they will need to adapt all kinds of things for use in their classrooms, I have them apply the geography curricular frameworks to whichever text we are reading.

In the case of Dark Tide, the author really did half the work for us. Puleo tells the true story of this disaster and its aftermath in the context of its times, tying it to global geopolitics and the geography of local immigrant communities. Working in teams, students created lesson plans for several different chapters, and I posted them on the class web page for other educators to use or modify.