It was a rare town in New England that was given a unique name by the early English and Scots-Irish settlers. Many New England place names came from towns and shires in England and Ireland. The Puritans even named groups ...

The Fourth of July has been celebrated with feasting, fireworks and festivity since Boston shot off cannons on the first anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The document wasn’t actually signed on the Fourth of July, as some of the ...

The McDonald brothers vowed they would be financially independent when their father was fired from his job at a New Hampshire shoe factory after 42 years of loyal service. No pension, no gold watch, no thank you. Stung by their ...

The Italian luxury liner Andrea Doria wasn't supposed to sink. She was engineered  using lessons learned from the Titanic. But on a calm summer day in peacetime, she sank off the Nantucket coast in the most shocking maritime disaster since the Titanic. The Andrea ...

Rachel Wall was hanged in Boston in 1789 for stealing a bonnet, but she wanted to be hanged as a pirate. She was New England’s only woman pirate and the last woman to be hanged in Boston. She was born ...

In February 1845, John Alfred Poor made an epic five-day dash through a blizzard in the White Mountains to snatch a railroad from under the noses of Boston’s powerful capitalists. He was bedridden for two months after his sleigh ride ...

The Wallingford shoebox murder was discovered on the Sunday morning of Aug. 8, 1886, by three young men rambling through farm country. Edward and Joseph Terrill and a friend were walking along an old logging road about three miles from ...

As any parent knows, keeping kids in shoes is a constant chore. If they aren’t outgrowing them, they’re destroying them. It was this second problem that attracted the attention of George Mitchell of Turner, Maine in the mid-1850s and led ...

The Great White Hurricane of 1888 struck on the night of March 11 and continued furiously for two days, dumping as much as 60 inches of snow on parts of the Northeast. It was one of the worst blizzards in ...

Think you know all about P.T. Barnum, newspaper editor, progressive mayor and hospital founder? Here are 14 facts about the great showman you may not know. 1. P.T. Barnum never said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” He did, however, ...