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 ...

In the spring of 1636, Lucy Downing wrote a letter from England to her older brother, John Winthrop, six years after he had led a group of Puritans to Massachusetts. Lucy and her family wanted to join them, but she ...

Thomas Hancock had two nephews: John, whose outsized signature on the Declaration of Independence is knowna round the world, and Ebenezer - John's younger brother. While they were just boys in Braintree, John and Ebenezer's father died. Four years Ebenezer's ...

By the time she died in 1875, Henriette Desportes was best known as a minister’s wife in Stockbridge, Mass. But behind that staid image was the story of a scandal that helped topple the King of France. Henriette Desportes was ...

Boston’s Rev. Mather Byles was a Tory through and through. His loyalty to England never wavered throughout the American Revolution. What set him apart from others, however, and may explain his ability to remain in Boston unmolested until his death ...

Moses Dunbar was hanged in Hartford, Conn., on March 19, 1777 – and his father, it is believed, offered the hemp for the noose. Moses was 30 years old, widowed, with five children. He had just remarried after his first ...