Doubtless many people are murdered in their sleep. But its not often the would-be murderer is asleep, too, suffering from somnambulism. But that was the case in 1833 in Pembroke, N.H., or at least that's what everyone believed. It was ...

A Loyalist House was likely to be seized and sold when the American Revolution broke out. Many colonies passed laws that let them confiscate the property of known Loyalists, criminalizing dissent against the war and raising revenue for the war ...

  People still can’t seem to get enough of the Salem witch trials. Since they started in 1692, the Salem witch trials have captured the popular imagination. They have been used to show why government persecutes the innocent, how the ...

Thomas Maule was an outspoken Quaker who was imprisoned five times, whipped three times and fined three times for criticizing Puritans in Salem, Mass. Though he believed in witches, he wrote God would punish the prosecutors of the Salem witch ...

Frederick Small was an awful little man, an abusive husband once reproached by a judge who said he let his wife cheat on him for profit. The judge was referring to Frederick Small’s behavior to his second wife. Small did ...

On July 19, 1723, officials in Newport, R.I., hanged 26 sailors for piracy before a jubilant crowd. They comprised half of all executions in Rhode Island between 1673 and February 13, 1845. Puritan minister Cotton Mather was pleased to get ...

A six-year-old girl named Med changed the course of history when she left her home in Louisiana on May 1, 1836. She was a slave, the daughter of another slave. Both were owned by Samuel Slater of New Orleans. Her ...

Rufus Choate was the first person to successfully use the sleepwalking defense in a sensational 19th-century trial for a man accused of murdering a prostitute. Rufus Choate was born in Ipswich, Mass., on Oct. 1, 1799 to an old New ...

The beautiful behemoth Reliance handily defended the America's Cup in 1903, but she was so freakishly big the contest’s rules on design were changed after the race. The challenge for the America’s Cup that year was issued by British tea ...

Samuel Sewall will forever be remembered as a judge in the Salem witch trials in 1692-3, less so for his apology five years later. He also wrote an essay criticizing slavery in 1700 called The Selling of Joseph. Samuel Sewall ...