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Pass the Tourtiere, C’est Le Reveillon!
For many, many years, le reveillon was the way Franco-Americans ushered in New Year’s Day in New England’s Little Canadas. The reveillon is a long, late dinner preceding a holiday, and central to it...
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Justin Winsor, the Genealogy Nut Who Founded the Library Profession
Libraries might be very different places today were it not for Justin Winsor, who became the head librarian at the Boston Public Library through a twist of fate in 1868. He was 34 years old and had...
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Lady Deborah Moody – A Dangerous Woman Comes to New England
In 1654 when New York governor Peter Stuyvesant needed help collecting taxes, he turned to Deborah Moody for help and the story of the Salem, Mass., woman had come full circle from outcast to...
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Samuel Gorton and his Gortonites Create a Church Among the Jack-an-Apes
By 1648, most New England leaders had it in for Samuel Gorton. In just a handful of years he had been kicked out of every town he moved to, infuriated even the famously tolerant Rhode Islanders, been...
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Mad Jack Oldham and the Start of the Pequot War
War between the early English colonists of New England and the Native Americans already here was perhaps unavoidable, though it wasn’t the goal of the Pilgrims when they crossed the Atlantic. But then...
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Revolutionary African-Americans in New England
When Martin Luther King, Jr., arrived in Boston in the fall of 1951, the word ‘freedom’ was very much in the air. The Freedom Trail had just been created, and it was an instant and enduring success....
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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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