Indian summer evolved over the centuries from a pioneer superstition to the poet’s best friend to the meteorologists’ whipping boy. It is a period of unusually warm, still days that follow a cold spell. The atmosphere is hazy or smoky, the ...

Once New England was home to the greatest forests and the tallest trees in the world. They were a major attraction for English colonists and their sponsors, who coveted the huge white pines as masts for the King’s Royal Navy. ...

One month after a tropical storm walloped Massachusetts, the Great Havana Hurricane of 1846 blew through New England, flattening factories, collapsing houses, uprooting trees and tearing up railroads. It was a storm of extraordinary size and strength, the most intense ...

The Fall River skeleton discovered in 1832 in a sand bank near a church had an unusual feature: It was clad in armor. Not 20 miles north another mysterious discovery had been made: Dighton Rock, a 40-ton boulder with strange ...

You might think the most challenging mountain climbing adventure in New England is Mount Washington in New Hampshire. You would be wrong. It’s actually in Foster, R.I. New England's high points are the subject of much lore and controversy. Henry ...

It will probably be several centuries before the Northeast United States again suffers a drought like the one in 1965. It was the driest year of a 10-year dry spell that devastated farms and sent municipal leaders into a panic ...

The Italian luxury liner Andrea Doria wasn't supposed to sink. She was engineered  using lessons learned from the Titanic. But on a calm summer day in peacetime, she sank off the Nantucket coast in the most shocking maritime disaster since the Titanic. The Andrea ...

The wild Maine blueberry was an underappreciated fruit for centuries until the Civil War put it on the national map. "We do not realize how rich our country is in berries," noted Henry David Thoreau in his lost manuscript Wild ...

As summer begins hinting at fall, fairs and festivals will begin preparing for that oddest of contests: Who can grow the biggest pumpkin? The tradition can trace its roots back to 1857 and Henry David Thoreau. The eccentric naturalist, author, ...

In 1809, a man named William Jarvis sent a flock of Spanish sheep to America and altered the landscape and the economy of Vermont. The prized merino sheep from Spain turned Vermont’s subsistence farmers into wealthy ranchers, fed the new ...