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John Coffin Nazro – The Man Who Owned Mount Washington
In 1851, John Coffin Nazro announced that God would be appearing at the top of Mount Washington in New Hampshire, which he was renaming Temple Heights to signify its role as home to a new religious...
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Hugh Manity, Depression-Era Love Cult Leader, Caught in the Garish Grip of...
Boston’s own love-cult leader, Dr. Hugh Manity, gave New England’s newspapers plenty of fodder in 1933 when he was arrested in his Cathedral of Cosmos for practicing medicine without a license....
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Was Bundling in Winter Really Less Dangerous Than a Sofa in Summer?
Few of New England’s folk customs caused the gentry as much embarrassment as the practice of bundling. It was considered a practice of unrefined rustics, sneered at by city slickers and the upper...
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Stedman Hanks Warns of the Perils of the Black Valley Road
Stedman Hanks had two passions in life: stopping the twin evils of liquor and slavery. He lived long enough to see one goal through, but not the other. Born in 1811, Hanks graduated from Amherst...
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The Puritanical Controversy Over the Meetinghouse Stove
Perhaps nothing revealed the puritanical contempt for comfort so much as the absence of a meetinghouse stove. The Puritans believed their religious zeal could warm them in unheated buildings, even in...
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Leonard Black, A Suffering Slave Who Clung to Hope
Leonard Black couldn’t read or write when he escaped slavery in Maryland, but he found a way to pay for his education. He told the story of his cruel masters in a booklet printed by a New Bedford...
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Judith Sargent Murray, the Forgotten Revolutionary
In 1984, 20 volumes of 5,000 letters by an 18th-century feminist were discovered in Natchez, Miss. They were written by Judith Sargent Murray, who copied all her correspondence starting at the age of...
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The New England Fat Men’s Club
In the beginning years of the 20th century, the tiny village of Wells River, Vt., was invaded annually by hordes of men with overhanging abdomens and double chins. The village tavern was the...
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Thomas Prince, New England’s First History Nut
Perhaps Thomas Prince can be forgiven for taking eight years to write about the first decade of New England’s history, since he started with Adam, as in Adam and Eve. He was a Puritan minister in...
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Benedict Arnold and the Rhode Island Quakers, Ranters and Heretics
In September of 1658, the United Colonies of New England – Salem, Boston, New Haven and Connecticut – jointly proclaimed that Quakers were neither welcome, nor would they be tolerated. And they urged...
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