These individual biographies seek to foreground the experiences of all the individuals held in bondage by the Ashley family.

Maine passed its first abortion statute in 1840, not long after the pardon of Dr. Call. Could there be a connection?

It was a relentless circle of brutal exploitation in which the salt raked by Mary Prince and other enslaved people was sold to northern fishermen who sold it back southward in the form of salted fish with which to feed the enslaved who raked the salt.

More importantly, our misappropriation of “puritan” has allowed scholars to ignore and the public to misunderstand religion.

Women’s work is often hidden or marginal within historical records that were meant to show men’s economic and political lives.

To judge from the Concord collection, the public forum of antebellum America was no model of democratic deliberation.

Martin’s confession relates outlaw adventures that appear to be original. But were they real? 

This is the story of how a visit by Frederick Douglass to south-central Massachusetts, its leadup and aftermath, epitomizes the movement’s ability to spread in the region.

Who was that traveler? And what did she signify to the poet?

By leading the risky but eventually successful financial operation, Elisha justified his name.

Daniel’s preordained path as Republican steward began well enough, but it soon took a tragic detour.

The Proctor of the play was inspired by Miller’s projection of himself into events of 1692 and it is worth digging a bit deeper into the family matters between John and Elizabeth. 

What happens when we place furniture into a context of lively and fraught interaction?

To put it otherwise, we cannot naturalize or uncritically center the extant assemblage of materials. We must historicize and contextualize why certain belongings, stories, and memories are visible, and others much less so.

Since I hadn’t found Memoir in the likely places based on the finding guide, I began going systematically, folder by folder, through the fifty boxes, more than a few of which still at that time contained bundles of Jenks’s many sermons inside, wrapped in wastepaper exactly as they had been when deposited at the library.

Presented as part of the special Politics Issue

Once the door was opened to popular control of government, who knew how far the people would go?

…without the bawdy world of Falstaff and Prince Hal and of Shakespeare’s jesters, beadles, and gravediggers or the hovering evil of murderous kings, corrupt priests, scheming witches, and ungrateful daughters there would have been nothing for those dissenting Puritans to dissent from.

The Puritan freemen may have the loudest voices in the archive; but theirs are not the only narratives being told.

If there was one thing Revolutionary orators knew, it was that if you wanted to move people to action, you had to touch something deep within them.

It turns out that, in legal terms, the mystery of who found the broadside matters a lot less than who lost it.

The reasons for keeping funeral broadsides may have been genealogical: the lyrical remembrance of ancestors perhaps struck a balance between the heraldic crests found in living rooms across America and the magnetic poetry on the fridge.

Last spring, the campus I have called home for the last twenty years suffered an unprecedented act of violence.

Increase Mather’s primary target was “Mixt or Promiscuous Dancing” of men and women together.

We began with only a rudimentary idea of how to build the wall.

“[I]n late March, just days before Plimoth Plantation’s village of 1627 was to come to life for the 2001 season, the museum’s 130 head of livestock were rounded up and removed to a modern breeding barn at the back of the property.”

Reading a 1959 article about a 1639 miscarriage in 2011 reveals how little the discourse about women’s bodies evolves over three hundred and twenty years.

Down and dirty in eighteenth-century London and Boston

“Whenever the pillars of Christianity shall be overthrown, our present republican forms of government, and all the blessings which flow […]

“He exclaimed ‘Lobsters! I’ll make Cornwallis and his men lobsters!”

Historical memory operates differently in professional military circles.

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“Massachusetts’ earliest laws were hostile to bowling.”

Bostonians of all political and economic factions came to identify themselves in opposition to the soldiers.

The gravestone surely served as a memorial for Desire Tripp and her family, but, as I came to learn in the course of my research, it also served as a site of local memory for individuals who never knew the family personally.

How Philip came to figure in the Grand March involves a story of music’s complex intertwining with memory in colonial contexts.

Is Columbus truly the moral equivalent of Hitler, as some of his critics argue? Was the ‘first Thanksgiving’ merely a pretext for the bloodshed, enslavement, and displacement that would follow in later decades?

These texts show how Anglo-Americans learned to love their walls and fences.

The gap between academic and popular understandings of early American topics is an enduring challenge for early Americanists. In the case of Thanksgiving, that gap is widening.

In the end, four papers stood out as making truly original contributions to scholarship on Salem witchcraft.

Booth does impressive work to illuminate Salem tableaus that don’t often get recreated in such detail, from the bustle of life along Union Wharf to the seedy rooms of the Mumford bar and brothel on the edge of town.

“Raphael’s claim that Massachusetts had completed the ‘first’ American Revolution in the latter of half of 1774 raises the perennial question as to what was the Revolution and how to periodize it.”

Manegold crafts a narrative not stuffed with jargon but filled with lively prose that not only links the reader to past events but illustrates their connection to modern-day issues.

By the 1830s, Americans more confidently adopted a modern notion of the self—made through purely individualistic means in the market—and obscured its formation through familial, communal, and national ties.

It is this messy interplay between the words of the minister and the experience of the hearer that produces the lived truth or application of the sermon.

Benevolence purchased a respectability that could transcend religious denominations.

Winiarski is primarily interested in the impact of the introduction of popular religion on New England. It will come as no surprise to scholars of the Great Awakening that he highlights the role that the 1740 arrival of Grand Itinerant George Whitefield played in unsetting an already religiously fractious New England.

In his new, excellent book on Puritanism, Baird Tipson emphasizes that this life of faith accrued assurance of salvation over the long haul. Conversion was not a moment; it was more like momentum.

While the Puritans feared the encroachment of the wilderness on their borders, the greater, paradoxical fear was of the perversion of the natural order lurking within human nature itself.

If a decade ago some folks were wondering why we had stopped taking religion seriously as a legitimate academic topic, today many are taking religion seriously enough to be willing to tip one of the sacred cows of Enlightenment modernity itself: that cow being, of course, secularism’s sense of its total victory.

After reading Van Engen’s iconoclastic work, it is difficult to remember why New England Calvinists are so often caricatured as cold and unfeeling.

Cornwell captures the multivalent nature of the Revolutionary War.

Neither natural magic nor the occult sciences such as alchemy and astrology (excepting only judicial astrology) were seen as incompatible with Reformed religion in the seventeenth century.

For Vowell, everything is always happening and always all at once. Her explicitly ethical and transhistorical interpretive method accounts for her unapologetically anachronistic style.

“It is with great pain we observe a species of libel has already appeared in our country in imitation of the abominable and licentious practice of the lower English, commonly called caricature, in which the unhappy object of abuse is exposed to vulgar derision…”

“In animadverting upon the acts of our ancestors, it is not to censure them as sinners above all others . . . ”

Prologue I had begun so many times.With snow, with leaves, with wind and rain,with a white initial A of sail,with […]

Kelly A. Ryan’s work, Regulating Passion: Sexuality and Patriarchal Rule in Massachusetts, 1700-1830, explores the intersections of patriarchal power and […]

Wheatley’s saying that her soul touched by Virtue can “guide [her] steps” is thus more than just a metaphor for God’s ability to change a converted person’s life: it is an acknowledgment of the immense power that God’s virtuous character can have over a person’s body and soul.

Rhys S. Bezzant, Jonathan Edwards and the Church. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. 328 pp., $49.95.

More than two centuries into our national experiment, it is still a vexing question: What is popular sovereignty? Who are […]

The cast of characters in Robert Love’s Warnings is astonishing. William Collier, a British veteran of the Seven Years’ War, journeyed to Boston from as far as South Carolina and East Florida in hopes of obtaining passage back to England.

Kathleen Donegan’s Seasons of Misery: Catastrophe and Colonial Settlement in Early America is a powerful retelling of initial English incursions at Roanoke, Jamestown, Plymouth, and Barbados.

Oldest Windmill on Cape Cod

If Mather’s portrait inspires reverence, another object associated with him helps bring him down a bit from his lofty position: his childhood highchair

Hendrick Aupaumut has had many collaborators, but it wouldn’t be entirely correct to say that he has worked with many of them.

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Money

Entering the world of big money meant encountering the challenges of empire.

By liberating her thoughts from the space of prose and her account from the limitations of physicality, Knight can transform the landscape through her narration, using poetry to “divert” and contain the threat of the unfamiliar.

Human love, not a wrenching religious conversion or spiritual journey, determined Johnston’s trajectory.

I sensed the spark of time travel, but even the most vaporous spirits seemed unable to slip between the apertures of the past and this particular May evening.

History teachers have gladly taken on the role of enabling citizenship, whether directly or indirectly. But that enterprise is undercut by standardized testing.

Whalers yearned for family members, wished for love and sex, drank and caroused in ports, and longed to prosper from any great catch.

Rarely has any figure in modern intellectual life so successfully harnessed the power of private institutions for public good, or achieved the fusion of thought and action, that Sizer did in his remarkable career.

Just as working with religiously committed scholars in graduate school had deepened my appreciation for the intellectual depth of perspectives rooted in faith, my experience at that Christian college helped me more easily imagine the closeted lives of skeptics in the early republic.

“Do [these pamphlets] represent what the Atheneum’s generous donors perceived as important materials of the day, things that any major cultural repository should hold?”

The most significant accomplishment of America’s Founding Food is the truly impressive collection of lively and illuminating primary-source accounts.

The Common-place Web Library reviews and lists online resources and Websites likely to be of interest to our viewers. Each […]

Three poems In God’s Altar: The Word and Flesh in Puritan Poetry (Berkeley, 1978), the literary critic Richard Daly writes that, for […]

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Money

Little money fluctuates widely in value, has lots of zeroes, is carried between the breasts of market women, and smells of overripe fruit, diesel smoke, sweat, and flesh.

“It may seem natural to us that in 1825 the children and grandchildren of minutemen would commemorate the fight at the North Bridge. It was not.”

To materiality Anderson therefore joins intertextuality: every page of his analysis is marked by an acute sense of how Bradford as reader and writer draws on and responds to an extensive archive of printed books and manuscripts.

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Money

From the mid-sixteenth through the seventeenth century, few topics aroused such extensive debate.

“Would-be conquerors might hold up animal brain cases as signs of their authority, but other observers interpreted the disembodied icons according to their own assumptions about power.”

I quickly realized that much more so than my other public-history projects, Colonial House had to weave historical accuracy with modern-day reality.

“Who was Mercy Lewis, and why did she hate George Burroughs?”

“How do students who have never produced original research papers begin to write about aspects of an important historical figure whose accomplishments have been mostly forgotten over time?”

“I could not overlook the biggest anachronism of all–that of character.”

From the model of scholarship and teaching he provided, I learned that the greatest of historians–such as himself–do not tolerate intellectual arrogance whether in others or in themselves.

One concept sure to provoke debate among scholars is the notion that a tribal understanding of the past may incorporate ways of knowing that are different from western epistemologies, yet more sophisticated than mere wishful thinking.

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