At a curious stone tower in Somerville, Massachusetts, panic in 1774 could have sparked a war seven months before Lexington and Concord entered the history books.
Persecuted as “heretics,” the Puritans emigrated to Massachusetts, where Governor John Winthrop hoped to create a “Citty upon a Hill.”
In “the cradle of the American Revolution,” loyalists to the Crown faced a harsh choice: live with terrible abuse where they were, or flee to friendlier, but alien regions.
We debated whether to name our new beer for the state symbol of Massachusetts or a favorite Boston patriot.
The story of the Pilgrims’ journey in 1620, and the voyage of Mayflower II in 1957, are still sources of inspiration today.
New England industrialists hired thousands of young farm girls to work together in early textile mills—and spawned a host of unintended consequences.
How tough Henry Knox hauled a train of cannon over wintry trails to help drive the British away from Boston
Its waters drove our first Industrial Revolution, and were poisoned by it. Henry David Thoreau believed that the Merrimack might not run pure again for thousands of years, but today, it is a welcoming pathway through a hundred-mile-long red-brick museum of America’s rise to power.
ON THE RUGGED COAST NORTH OF BOSTON, FOUR TOWNS SHARE A LONG HISTORY OF MORTAL PERIL AND ENDURING BEAUTY.
STOCKBRIDGE MARKS THE HOLIDAYS BY SUMMONING BACK A WORLD THAT NORMAN ROCKWELL CREATED.
In a tranquil Cape Cod village, the past is writ in glass.
Can it be fair? Humane? Does it deter crime? These very current questions troubled Americans just as much in the day of the Salem witch trials as in the day of Timothy McVeigh.
A hundred and fifty years ago, famine in Ireland fostered a desperate, unprecedented mass-migration to America. Neither country has been the same since.
When Henry Adams sought the medieval world in an automobile, this stuffiest of prophets became the first American to sing of the liberating force later celebrated by Jack Kerouac and the Beach Boys.
Is trial by jury the essential underpinning of our system of justice or, as more and more critics charge, a relic so flawed that it should perhaps even be abolished? An experienced trial judge examines the historical evidence in the case.
A D-DAY VETERAN’S GRANDSON ATTEMPTS TO FIND THE ANSWER TO THAT MOST IMPENETRABLE QUESTION: WHAT WAS IT LIKE?
John Adams and Thomas Jefferson stood together in America’s perilous dawn, but politics soon drove them apart. Then, in their last years, the two old enemies began a remarkable correspondence that is both testimony to the power of friendship and an eloquent summary of the dialogue that went on within the Revolutionary generation and that continues within our own.
On the hundredth anniversary of the unsolved double-murder of Andrew and Abby Borden, is it time to ask: What was going on in Lizzie Borden's family?
A rare survivor of New England’s earliest days testifies to the strength that forged a nation.
A small but dependable pleasure of travel is encountering such blazons of civic pride as “Welcome to the City of Cheese, Chairs, Children, and Churches!”
For a century now it has been a haven to some, an outrage to others—and it is one of the very few social institutions that have survived their founders’ world
While the Revolution was still being fought, Mum Bett declared that the new nation’s principle of liberty must extend to her too. It took eighty years and a far more terrible war to confirm the rights she demanded.
Had Thomas Morton raised his maypole anywhere but next door to the Pilgrims, history and legend probably would have no record of him, his town, or his “lascivious” revels
One of America s truly great men—scientist, philosopher, and literary genius—forged his character in the throes of adversity
How Hadley, Massachusetts, (incorporated 1661) coped with wolves, drunks, Indians, witches, and the laws of God and man.
The author recalls two generations of “Cliffie” life—hers and her mother’s—in the years when male and female education took place on opposite sides of the Cambridge Common and women were expected to wear hats in Harvard Square
In reconstructing the past, Old Sturbridge Village is doing a lot more than selling penny candy and buggy rides. Struggling for verisimilitude, curators are raising scrawny chickens, trudging behind 150-year-old plows—and keeping pesticides out of the orchards.