The history of Martha's Vineyard is the history of arrivals from elsewhere, of meetings and gatherings. The Island's population has, as a result, always been richly diverse. A hundred thousand life stories have unfolded on these hundred square miles of clay, gravel, and sandy soil, but only a fraction have been told, and the uniformity of their subjects (overwhelmingly, prosperous able-bodied white men engaged in public life) belies the diversity of Vineyarders.
Great strides in broadening that once-narrow vision have been made in the last half-century and, especially, in the two decades between the first (1997) and second (2016) editions of this volume. They varied in scope, sources, and focus, but were united by a common conviction that African American history is not peripheral, but central, to Vineyard history.