Seeing the Past: Stories on the Trail of a Yankee Millwright

Seeing the Past: Stories on the Trail of a Yankee Millwright is a work of narrative local history by James T. Powers, a Connecticut history teacher and researcher. The book follows the life of Milo Todd, a nineteenth-century millwright, using his odyssey as a thread through several centuries of New England history.

Powers moves from a Native village on the shore of Long Island Sound at the start of the seventeenth century through to Hartford at the height of nineteenth-century New England industrial capitalism, using Todd's trade and travels to connect archaeology, colonial architecture, and regional social history into a single narrative.

The book draws on Powers's background teaching history and studying New England colonial architecture and archaeology in Guilford, Connecticut, and is aimed at readers interested in regional American history told through one ordinary tradesman's life rather than a broad institutional account.