On Nov. 5, 1872, Benjamin Briggs of Wareham, Mass. piloted the brigantine Mary Celeste to sea loaded with cargo for Genoa. It was the last time anyone saw Briggs or any of his crew alive. The mystery of the Mary ...

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. ...

Beginning in 1836, many young ladies turned to a popular advice manual, A Young Lady’s Friend, which told them how to dress and to behave after they finished their schooling. A proper young lady was as constrained by expectations as ...

New England is dotted with famous writers houses, a testament to the Puritan ideal of literacy and the region’s many publishing houses. Some writers, like Rudyard Kipling, were born elsewhere, but wrote prolifically while living in New England. Some, like ...

In 1830, Joseph Palmer bucked the fashion trend and wore a flowing beard – for which he was persecuted and jailed. Since 1720, non-Jewish American men stopped wearing beards and moustaches. Except for Joseph Palmer. He was born in 1789 ...

Wallace Stevens was a plodding insurance executive in Hartford for nearly all of his adult life, except when he spent winter vacations in Key West. There he got drunk and fought with Robert Frost and Ernest Hemingway. Stevens was also ...

  Indian summer has evolved over the centuries from a pioneer superstition to the poet’s best friend to the meteorologists’ whipping boy. It is a period of unusually warm, still days that follow a cold spell, the atmosphere is hazy ...

The summer White House has been a feature of presidential life since John Adams returned to Quincy, Mass., to get away from the muggy heat of Washington, D.C. Spending time away from the nation’s capital also allowed the president to ...

In the Peterkin Papers, Lucretia Hale turned taking jibes at the haplessness of over-educated, citified folk into an art form. Hale was a prolific author of both short stories and novels. She was daughter of Boston newspaperman Nathan Hale (a ...

Dozens of Little Canadas have contributed a significant but often ignored part of the character and history of New England since the 19th century. They’ve given us magnificent churches, Catholic hospitals and sports heroes like Springfield’s Leo Durocher and Woonsocket’s ...