Samuel Willard Crompton has spent much of his life within 100 miles of Boston, but he's never been a city kid. Rather, he was the country boy who observed the city from afar. He teaches history at Holyoke Community College in western Massachusetts and is the author or editor of many books, including Visible Ink's The Handy Civil War Answer Book, The Handy Military History Answer Book and The Handy State-by-State Answer Book: A Guide to the 50 States of America. He has a special interest in late-seventeenth-century Boston, the time when the Puritan ethos began to yield to that of the Yankee. As for sports, he has never run in the Boston Marathon, but he was at Fenway the night before Carl Yastremski made baseball history with his 3,000th career hit. He resides in Hadley, MA.