Why did anyone bother to build Barkhamsted Lighthouse in the hills of Western Connecticut? According to legend it was a love denied that inspired the village that became known as Barkhamsted Lighthouse. Author and educator Lewis S. Mills turned the ...

In the early 1600s, the Anglican Church was under criticism from all manner of dissenters offering a wide variety of opinions on how the church should change. The Puritan beliefs are probably the best-remembered, and the Puritan zeal to change ...

Boston, today that most Catholic of American cities, had no Catholic church within 300 miles when Father Jean-Louis Lefebvre Cheverus arrived in 1796. The 600 or so Catholics living in Massachusetts were mostly poor Irish and a few French. They ...

Does the Book of Mormon, the sacred text of the Mormon Church, owe its existence to Nathaniel Woods, leader of an unusual Vermont religious sect founded in 1789? Some historians see a connection. The story of Nathaniel Woods and his ...

When she was 10 years old, Louisa May Alcott in 1843 was taken to live at a commune called Fruitlands by her high-minded but improvident father. Fruitlands was a utopian experiment, a model of love and unselfishness for the rest ...

Mothers have always had to balance competing demands, and some of those who did it best made history. Mindful that Mother's Day is around the corner, we bring you more than six New England mothers who left a mark on ...

Margaret Fuller, who spent her life protesting injustice, died at the age of 40 in a shipwreck off New York Harbor while onlookers watched from the shore. She was America’s first feminist, first female literary critic and first woman foreign ...

In 1656, the Hartford Controversy cost Rev. John Russell his job. In the 1650s the church at Hartford, Conn. was one of the most prominent congregations in the colonies. Built by Rev. Thomas Hooker, today regarded as the Father of ...

  John Winthrop famously wrote in this journal that the Arbella departed for the New World on Easter Monday – March 29, 1630. But upon arriving in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Winthrop and his fellow Puritans took pains to avoid ...

Identifying New England’s oldest libraries is no easy task, as the first colonists valued literacy and education for boys and girls. The Puritans, after all, wanted everyone to read the Bible. Many New England libraries evolved over time from private collections ...