Are witches old ladies who live in candy houses and eat children? Are they naked maidens dancing in a circle and celebrating the moon? Are they riding broomsticks to a black mass where they’ll worship Satan, or being dragged to …
Wild World of Witchcraft – Live in Salem with Grady Hendrix Read More »
It was lauded as the quintessential Puritan village by author Sumner Chilton Powell in his 1964 Pulitzer Prize-winning history of its founding in 1638. But what was the true story of Sudbury, Massachusetts, the second town established west of Boston …
On April 2, 1976, Science Magazine published an article by Linnda R. Caporeal which posited that during the 1692 Salem witchcraft trials, the visions of specters and painful physical sensations described by the girls who claimed to be afflicted by witches could have …
The Salem Witchcraft Trials and ‘Moldy Bread’: A Case Study in Fake News Read More »
Ships in the sky, "monsters" born to unruly women, babies prophesying from their cradles, flying devils: Welcome to the mental world of 17th century New England. Renowned Harvard historian David Hall explores the way that early New Englanders understood their …
Wonders, Portents, and Providences in Early New England Read More »
Whether your ancestors arrived at Jamestown, on the Mayflower, or came over in the years following, the majority of us with colonial ancestry hope to trace our family trees back to England. While there is a wealth of information available …
Professor Emerson “Tad” Baker presents: Long before French-Canadians migrated to Maine, their ancestors fought alongside their Wabanaki allies against the English settlers of the region in a lethal conflict some have called the real first world war of 1688-1697. The …
In 1686 the English crown dissolved local government in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and put a royal favorite, Edmund Andros, in charge of a consolidated Dominion of New England. Reluctant to express disloyalty to the king, Bostonians endured ever-increasing taxes …
The Revolution before the Revolution: Boston, 1689 Read More »
John Adams and his fellow revolutionaries were well aware of the injustices of the Salem witch trials, indeed some patriots, including Benjamin Franklin, had family involved in the trials and Marblehead native, Elbridge Gerry, surely had the victims of the …
1692 to 1775: Connecting the Salem Witch Trials and the Revolutionary Era Read More »
It is easy to act like crusading is a medieval phenomenon that we evolve past—after all, when we picture the Crusades, we see knights in shining armor dying in the dry heat on their way to Jerusalem, an activity that …
Over several decades beginning in 1620, tens of thousands of devout English colonists known as puritans came to America. They believed that bringing Christianity to the Natives would liberate them from darkness. Daniel Gookin, Massachusetts' missionary superintendent, called such efforts …
