Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Massachusetts
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.”
Editor’s Note: After a distinguished career as a journalist, television commentator, and president and editor-in-chief of Congressional Quarterly, Robert Merry turned to writing history.
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.
Editor’s Note: Jim Koch founded the Boston Beer Company in 1984 and is widely considered a founding father of the American craft-brewing movement.
The story of the Pilgrims’ journey in 1620, and the voyage of Mayflower II in 1957, are still sources of inspiration today.
Editor’s Note: We are delighted to publish another essay by Nathaniel Philbrick, author of such outstanding books as In The Heart of the Sea and Sea of Glory.
New England industrialists hired thousands of young farm girls to work together in early textile mills—and spawned a host of unintended consequences.
In June 1833, President Andrew Jackson, visiting the brand-new factory town of Lowell, Massachusetts, watched as 2500 female mill workers marched past the balcony of his hotel.
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.
A tourist’s itinerary published by the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce deals briskly with the Cape’s oldest town: “11:00 A.M. Arrive Sandwich, Visit Sandwich Glass Museum, Dexter Grist Mill, Shawme Pond.
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.
Test-driving automobiles, Henry Adams discovered in June 1904, was “shattering to one’s nerves.” Trying out a Hotchkiss for purchase “scared my hair green. Truly it is a new world that I live in,” he continued, “though its spots are old.
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.
The distinguished lawyer could not restrain himself. Even in the somber pages of the American Bar Association’s Tort & Insurance Law Journal late last year, his rage blazed and fulminated.
A D-DAY VETERAN’S GRANDSON ATTEMPTS TO FIND THE ANSWER TO THAT MOST IMPENETRABLE QUESTION: WHAT WAS IT LIKE?
The Reverend Maurice Kidder used to wake at 5:00 to write sermons in his dark study where the beagle slept; that early hour seemed to give him the clarity to compose his lectures, which he delivered in an unaffected but commanding baritone voice each Sunday a
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!”
Stephen Vincent Benét confessed that he had fallen in love with American placenames, and George R.
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.
I‘m sorry, son,” said the father to his young offspring in a New Yorker cartoon some years ago, “but we WASPs have no tribal wisdom to pass on.”
While the American Revolution was still being fought, Mum Bett declared that the new nation’s principle of liberty must extend to her, too. It took 80 years and a far-more-terrible war to confirm the rights that she had demanded.
Mum Bett, aka Elizabeth
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.
TIME: Summer, 1628.
One of America s truly great men—scientist, philosopher, and literary genius—forged his character in the throes of adversity
THE YEAR IS 1890 and the place Cambridge, Massachusetts.
How Hadley, Massachusetts, (incorporated 1661) coped with wolves, drunks, Indians, witches, and the laws of God and man.
DURING THE FIRST half of the nineteenth century, there lived in the Connecticut River valley of Massachusetts a scholar and country editor with an insatiable curiosity about the region in which he lived.
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
My mother was a member of the class of 1899 at Radcliffe College, having come east from St. Paul, Minnesota—a sort of reverse pioneer.
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.
Just inside the late Pliny Freeman’s 180-year-old barn in Old Sturbridge Village, I recently watched a gray-haired gentleman eyeing with evident disgust a bucket of wormy apples freshly picked from the Freeman Farm’s cider orchard.
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