During the 150 years before the American Revolution, a series of aristocrats known as the River Gods ruled the Connecticut River Valley. Their domain had its own economy and culture, which eventually resembled England more than settlements to the east ...

On Feb. 28, 1638, the slave trade probably began in New England when a ship arrived in Massachusetts Bay from the West Indies. The Salem ship Desire carried enslaved Africans along with the other cargo of cotton and tobacco. After a slow ...

The great 1755 earthquake was part of a series of earthquakes (probably related to each other) that wracked both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. It destroyed major parts of Lisbon in Portugal when a fissure as wide as 16 feet ...

In 1673 word reached England that the Rev. Josiah Baxter had been ruthlessly murdered in Boston. Baxter was an Anglican minister who had gotten caught up in a public debate with a group of Baptists over their interpretations of the ...

Early New Englanders, influenced by the Puritans, were reluctant celebrants for most holidays. Religious festivals, they felt, were un-Christian and pagan. Yet as the 1600s progressed New Englanders began incorporating a number of festivals and celebrations into their calendar. Some ...

The Puritan leaders of Massachusetts viewed Obadiah Holmes as a loathsome Baptist, and they ordered him whipped 30 times in public. In Puritan eyes, crimes against their religion were far worse than crimes against property. They punished blasphemy with the ...

James DeWolf died the second richest man in America after accumulating a fortune from buying, selling and – in one case – murdering slaves. He was born into two powerful slave-trading families in Rhode Island, the DeWolfs and the Potters. ...

In 1675, William Scant of Braintree, Mass., was brought before the court for breaking a law called the Old Deluder Satan Act: He had refused to educate his children. The court ordered Braintree’s selectmen to find another home for 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 ...

In February 1788, George Washington was staying close to home at Mount Vernon, anxiously awaiting news from New Hampshire. The state’s constitutional convention was to be held on February 13, and his friend John Langdon and his former general John ...