Portsmouth, Displacement, and Belonging in The Tears of Other People

Strawbery Banke Museum, Portsmouth, New Hampshire (2015) | smilla4 / CC BY-NC 2.0

E. M. Ippolito’s relationship to her hometown of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, is a complicated one. While Ippolito’s exploration of Portsmouth’s working-class history began when she was a college student, it was her own displacement from Portsmouth that personalized her research. Learning the story of Portsmouth’s 1960s urban renewal—a federally funded project that replaced the working-class, multi-ethnic, immigrant enclave known as Puddle Dock with a colonial history museum—shed light on the modern gentrification that ultimately forced Ippolito out of the city. Displaced but still deeply attached to Portsmouth, Ippolito began to ask the question, “Who or what enables displacement?” 

Her debut book, The Tears of Other People (Irrelevant Press, 2025), combines memoir and research in a detailed account of Portsmouth’s waterfront and argues strenuously against historical inevitability. Instead, Ippolito asserts that urban renewal was the result of a longer legacy of settler colonialism and racial capitalism, leading her to push for an overhaul of the institutions (such as Portsmouth’s historic preservation museums) that continue to price people out of the city.

Ippolito sat down with Eva Szilardi-Tierney to discuss what lessons she hopes readers will take—and have already taken—from her book.

Eva Szilardi-Tierney: After your book came out in August [2025], you went on a book tour that included a few stops in your hometown. A lot of your analysis takes the powers that be in Portsmouth to task, so I’m curious: What did people in Portsmouth think about your book?

E. M. Ippolito: The simple answer is: I’m really flattered at the enthusiasm for the book in Portsmouth. I think the more nuanced answer is that Portsmouth is nothing if not polite, and I somewhat mistrust the way that the general public in Portsmouth tends to engage with revolutionary ideas and difficult, inconvenient political realities. I think time will tell whether this book has an effect politically, but people seem to be radicalizing really quickly in Portsmouth right now. Portsmouth is unfortunately a site of a lot of ICE deportations. Pease Airport in Portsmouth has been seeing a lot of deportation flights facilitated by the federal government, which is really pissing people off. During my book tour, I physically witnessed deportations at Pease. This is just a crazy time to be talking about this kind of history, and [on my tour] I met my audiences with a lot of anger, not towards them but towards the city. I found that anger reciprocated in kind of an unexpected and special way from a lot of folks. Things are changing.

Szilardi-Tierney: At its beginning, you discuss the book and your research as a way of finding closure after your own displacement from Portsmouth due to the rising cost of living. How did this purpose influence how you structured your research, and do you feel like you got that closure from this project?

Ippolito: Yes and no. The project started as a much more academic or purely intellectual project regarding the connections between modern displacing paradigms of urban renewal, gentrification, and the kind of larger structure of settler colonialism. I was studying that stuff from a theoretical angle, and then when it started to feel unavoidably personal was when I tried to move back to Portsmouth and couldn’t afford it. My own displacement started to feel a lot more real and tangible. A real bitterness started to congeal, and at first it felt like taking a risk to put that in the book so openly. But the more I did oral histories, the more I was like, If I’m talking about the subjectivity of everybody else in the story, I think my own subjectivity is important.  

Szilardi-Tierney: How did the experience of researching Portsmouth change the way you look at US cities in general?

Ippolito: I think that what I hoped to talk about here is that in the particular local historiography of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, people have not talked that much about the history of the city as a history of class struggle. And on the other hand, people have not talked that much about the history of Portsmouth as a settler colony. I wanted to contribute that to the best of my ability, and I really hope that people expand on and critique what I was able to push into the historiography for the first time.

Szilardi-Tierney: One of the insights that you have in the book is about Portsmouth residents in the current day looking back at the working-class and/or immigrant folks who lived in the Puddle Dock neighborhood (and who were ultimately displaced by urban renewal) as this almost noble savage archetype. What do we lose when we think about people in the past that way, and what do you hope, after reading your book, people understand about Puddle Dockers?

Ippolito: Puddle Dockers were not, by and large, perfectly noble people. Puddle Dockers were anti-Black, Puddle Dockers beat their wives, Puddle Dockers spit on the sex workers who were their neighbors. When you frame immigrants as simply a good, noble group, that’s not a very historical way of looking at the past or looking at the world as it is now. And I think that we’re all owed a greater degree of rigor.

Szilardi-Tierney: How do you hope your portrayal or description of the lives of Puddle Dockers pushes against that? You include the things that they did that were harmful, but you also talk a lot about the ways that they supported each other and that being an aspirational thing that we don’t have anymore. So how do we reconcile those two things?

Ippolito: One of the things I argue for in the book is rejecting uncritical nostalgia altogether. The stakes of the struggles we inherit are such that we don’t really have time to indulge in uncritical nostalgia. Certainly there’s loss in the destruction of Puddle Dock, the destruction of the North End. But there’s also no going back to those things, and there shouldn’t be because they were deeply, deeply imperfect, and they were inextricable from the larger settler colonial and capitalist project of Portsmouth. The future that I hope for is not one of nostalgia or regression. It’s a revolutionary future where the fundamental violence that both defined and eventually destroyed Puddle Dock is resolved.

Szilardi-Tierney: One of the most unique things about urban renewal in Portsmouth is the role of historic preservation, and specifically the role of the Strawbery Banke Museum, which you argue provided critical support for urban renewal. It was interesting to read about how ideas about belonging and nostalgia can be reified through these colonial preservation projects, but you also talk about how, in the current day, these institutions are trying to create a space that’s more inclusive. What do you think an institution like Strawberry Banke should do going forward?

Ippolito: That is maybe one of the most urgent questions of the book. What I hoped to do in this book was to be really polemical and really provocative. And with that in mind, I would say that yes, Strawbery Banke has changed and improved in a partial sense. They essentially started as a monument to white supremacy. They were an active participant in the urban renewal that destroyed Puddle Dock, and they were ahistorically celebrating the genocide of Abenaki and Pennacook people. And they’re very different now. They have a much more functional relationship with different Indigenous scholars and nations. But the core of what I hope to see is a fundamental shift away from historical preservation and towards what I call an ethics of historical restitution. If you’re a curator, historian, and you’re a person of conscience, you have a responsibility to the history beyond just telling it and preserving it. You have a responsibility to shape the history which you’re a part of and to do that in a restorative way.

Szilardi-Tierney: You mentioned that this line of thinking about historic preservation was a big part of your book tour. Did any of these ideas come up during your events, and were they received with support?

Ippolito: What I was trying to say, and what I did say, is, I’m not delusional. It’s not like I think we’ve got tons and tons of money. But the difficult thing is that it’s not an easy or neutral responsibility to hold cultural heritage. That’s a deep vocation that we should all be taking seriously. There are some historically preserved buildings that as a historian, I do not see the value in maintaining. I don’t see the point in maintaining them as monuments to the merchants and the enslavers who created them. I hope to live to see Land Back [reparations initiative to restore Indigenous sovereignty]. I hope to live to see serious attempts at reparations. There’s enough genuine goodwill in the cultural heritage space and in the museum space that with courage, you could literally get people kick-starting a project of Land Back and kick-starting a project of reparations autonomously—with no oversight by the government. And I don’t think that people take that possibility seriously enough. It’s time to treat history not just as a humanities discipline but to have a serious practice in our understanding of the past.

Click here to read an excerpt from The Tears of Other People: A History and Memoir of Displacement in Portsmouth, New Hampshire by E. M. Ippolito.