London’s Downing Street, home of the British Prime Minister, was built by a Puritan from Massachusetts who switched sides in the English Civil War. George Downing was John Winthrop’s nephew, a member of Harvard’s first graduating class and a soldier ...

A century before the film Manchester by the Sea was nominated for six Academy Awards, New England played many a starring role on the silver screen. Connecticut’s own Katharine Hepburn created the iconic New England woman in 1933 as Jo in ...

Chop suey sandwiches have marked the beginning of summer for generations of people who grew up on the North Shore of Massachusetts. The beloved cheap treat was once sold throughout New England and as far south as Coney Island in ...

When the unfinished Washington Monument was still but an eyesore on the National Mall, William Wetmore Story tried to prevent it from becoming an example of American bad taste. Story was the Massachusetts-born son of a famous American judge. He ...

Arthur Miller ostensibly wrote his classic drama The Crucible about the Salem witch trials of 1692, but he really wroteabout Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s hunt for Communists. The play is about a teenager who falls in love with a man who ...

In 1890, the descendants of two of America’s first families – the Sargents and the Hamiltons – traveled to Wyoming to start a new life. Their story of murder and insanity, if it wasn’t provably true, would seem like the ...

In 1936 Rhode Island was planning to celebrate its Tercentenary. It seemed only fitting that the state should get its founder out of his legal hot water. In 1636 Roger Williams and a group of his followers established Rhode Island ...

People still can’t seem to get enough of the Salem witch trials, which remain a mainstay of popular culture 325 years after they started. Writers and artists used the Salem witch trials to show why government persecutes the innocent, how the ignorant ...

Samuel Sewall is best known as one of the nine judges who condemned witches to death in the Salem witch trials of 1692 – an act for which he later apologized. His detailed diary records many of the actions and ...

Four friends gather to drink from the fountain of youth only to learn that there is no escaping the foolishness and mistakes they made as younger men and women. That was the plot of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment. The ...