John McWilliams' book is an ambitious attempt to review New England history and literature from the Puritans through the Revolutionary period to the antebellum era. McWilliams demonstrates how successive narratives of crises, real or imagined, reflected historical realities which proved adaptable to later settlers. Offering an all-encompassing narrative of one crucial region in the American literary and historical experience, he brings to light new contexts for understanding crucial events in early American literature and history.

In Alberta, Canada, at the foot of Dead Horse Mountain, a space capsule is discovered-a capsule that shouldn't exist. Thirty years earlier, Dr. Jan Lee, American entrepreneur and space tourist, purportedly destroyed this craft when he blew up the International Space Station in an act of unexplained sabotage. That event has since inspired conspiracy theories ranging from espionage to alien invasion.

Special Agents Lauren Madison and Ellis Cole have been assigned to investigate. But inside the capsule they find an even greater mystery: the remnants of a three-decade-old...