The 1978 blizzard started with snow during the morning of February 6. It didn’t stop for 33 hours, dumping two feet of snow on New England. Sometimes it fell as fast as four inches an hour. Parts of Boston’s South ...

Don Pedro, the handsome, ruthless Spanish pirate, apparently didn’t get the memo in 1832 that piracy was over in the Atlantic Ocean. He made a reckless move on the high seas against a brig from Salem, Mass., and he paid ...

Mary Gray Bidwell and her husband Barnabas resembled in many ways John and Abigail Adams. Both belonged to the local gentry, and they had brains and ambition. Like the Adamses, they loved each other and corresponded regularly during Barnabas’ long ...

Louis de Rochemont had a bone to pick in 1938. In the 1930s, American attitudes toward Nazi Germany and Adolph Hitler were mixed. Even as Hitler ratcheted up his attacks on German Jews and increased his rhetoric about Germany reclaiming ...

In 1921, coroners had Edward Searles body exhumed months after his death. Their conclusion, after examination, was that he had not been poisoned with arsenic as they had suspected. He died of natural causes. And when they planted him back ...

On Aug. 6, 1920, Shaker Brother Irving Greenwood brought a new Cadillac home to Canterbury Shaker Village. It was a beauty, he wrote in his diary. The Cadillac arrived 146 years to the day after a poor group of immigrants ...

A little Vermont schoolhouse washed away in the 1927 flood became an inspiring symbol of the state’s resilience when schoolchildren around the country sent in their pennies to replace it. A wealthy woman made a big donation as well, but ...

Wallace Stevens was a plodding insurance executive in Hartford for nearly all of his adult life, except when he spent winter vacations in Key West. There he got drunk and fought with Robert Frost and Ernest Hemingway. Stevens was also ...

In 1867, Harriet Beecher Stowe and her husband Calvin, tiring of New England's cold climate, visited Florida for the first time. They were instantly smitten, bought a home complete with orange groves, and for the next 17 years were regular ...

The summer season inspires far fewer sayings in New England than spring, fall or winter, probably because it’s so short and so cool. After all, three straight days of 90 degrees is considered a heat wave in New England. The ...