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 ...

  On Jan. 13, 1942, German U-boat attacks officially started against merchant ships along the Eastern Seaboard of North America. From then until early August, Nazi U-boats dominated the waters off the East Coast, sinking fuel tankers and cargo ships ...

Charles Ponzi in his office. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.Charles Ponzi sent Bostonians into such a frenzy over his get-rich-quick scheme in 1920 that police had to subdue enthusiastic investors. They overflowed from his North End banking ...

Al Capp earned legions of fans for his bitingly satirical cartoon strip Li’l Abner. President Richard Nixon and Queen Elizabeth admired his work, as did William F. Buckley, Al Hirschfeld, Harpo Marx, John Kenneth Galbraith and John Updike. In 1953, John Steinbeck called ...