Accounts of French revolutionary violence issuing from Connecticut presses both reflected and shaped the public mindset. Drawing on pre-existing elements of popular culture, the descriptions established tropes which Connecticut public figures utilized to shape public opinion and fashion the state's self-image as the “Land of Steady Habits.”

A history of the book approach to Thomas Hutchinson's History of Massachusetts Bay (published 1764-1828) recovers his commitment to preserve facts and his place in eighteenth-century historiography. Hutchinson's vilification by patriots still obscures our understanding of his loyalism. The article reassesses late colonial society, the American Revolution, and Anglo-American culture in the British Atlantic World.

This essay re-examines the “bishop controversy”, a dispute between Anglicans and Dissenters in the decade preceding the American Revolution. The controversy, it argues, was part of the imperial crisis caused by the Seven Years' War and the government's toleration of French Catholics in Quebec. This perspective highlights the Church of England's limited role in the empire and the unacknowledged radicalism of loyalist Anglicans.

Two exceptional colonial poems, Thomas Morton's version of the events around his Maypole at Merrymount and Benjamin Tompson's epics on King Philip's War, are heavily classical, especially in their descriptions of Native Americans. The essay examines the advantages that the use of classical comparisons have over the more common tropes of Biblical typology.

This essay examines how Orestes Brownson used literary criticism as a medium to distance himself from the Transcendentalist movement. It argues that Brownson's qualified rejection of Transcendentalism played a crucial role in the formation of his professional identity as a literary critic and public intellectual in the mid-nineteenth-century literary sphere.

This essay discusses the failed efforts of Boston physician and woman's rights activist Harriot Kezia Hunt to study at Harvard's Medical School in 1847 and 1850. It explores the fractious and gendered nature of medicine in antebellum America and concerns about professionalism, gender roles, student retention, and interracial mixing at Harvard.

This essay presents Louisa May Alcott's conception of an artist, one that gives nineteenth century women access to that title. Based in her poetry, Alcott's notion of art both draws from and resists Transcendentalist theology as it counters sentimentalist cliches about women writers. Ellen Sturgis Hooper is revealed as a major influence on Alcott.

This essay attributes an 1815 condemnation of fornication, published in Vermont, to Lemuel Haynes (1753-1833). Redressing a deficit of scholarly attention to sexuality in early African American print culture, it contextualizes Haynes's document within a spectrum of similar texts, and notes the variety of print culture instruments available to early African American authors, including anonymous publication, financial subscription, and publishing under a white author's name.

This article examines texts produced in response to the criminal trial of Joseph Mountain to illuminate the early construction of the black rapist in American print. The central text in its analysis is Mountain's own “criminal confession,” Sketches of the Life of Joseph Mountain (1790). This article views Mountain's text as a response to a different set of concerns than later narratives of African Americans convicted of rape and positions Mountain's biography as a response not merely to concerns over black slave revolt alone, but to a related, if more immediate threat of cross-racial, proletarian revolution.

This essay charts how Ralph Waldo Emerson and Wendell Phillips found common ground in militant abolitionism through a reimagination of their Puritan heritage. It argues that in embracing their ancestors as Cromwellian spiritual warriors, they depart from usual “concepts of Puritan ancestry” and offer a way to heed calls for new literary histories.

In The House of the Seven Gables Nathaniel Hawthorne employs a soundscape particularly attuned to the modern dissonances and spiritual soundings of antebellum America. His novel interrogates the impact of these auditory-acoustic structures on constructions of the self, ultimately revealing the politics of audibility emerging in the nineteenth century.

This article examines religious, scientific, and media responses to the 1755 Cape Ann earthquake, which affected Boston and other regions throughout the Atlantic world. The earthquake's prolonged generation of environmental data challenged American colonists' attempts to achieve certainty about the natural disaster. Further news of the famous and devastating Lisbon earthquake forced Americans to broaden their horizon of environmental change to one that extended into the ocean–a formative moment for the development of transatlantic science, and one that can help historians resolve seemingly opposed historiographic currents.

The essay recasts Hawthorne's tales, “Alice Doane's Appeal” and “The Great Carbuncle” in the gift book, The Token, or Atlantic Souvenir where they were first published. Reading the tales alongside the neighboring entries, it seeks to show how Hawthorne's understanding of his own literary gift developed against the sentimental publishing culture of the 1830s.

Analyzing the material culture of English, French, and Native communion ceremonies, and debates over communion and cannibalism, this article argues that peoples in the borderlands between colonial New England and New France refused to recognize their cultural similarities, a cross-cultural failure of communication with violent consequences.

This essay considers the intersection of race and religion in seventeenth-century puritan New England by reconstructing the life of a young enslaved African woman identified in church records as “Dorcas ye blackmore” and by examining the efforts of the brethren of the Dorchester First Church to secure her legal freedom.

This essay critically examines and revises the story of the 1807 founding of the Boston Athenæum. The institution was said to be inspired by a written description of the Athenæum of Liverpool (UK), but I argue that this traditional story is a fabrication, one knowingly invented by Boston's men of letters.

During the French and Indian War, Massachusetts colonists invoked their charter rights to control mobilization. Colonists revered their charter because it provided effective government that tangibly affected their lives. They entered the Imperial Crisis believing that British officials such as William Shirley, Francis Bernard, and Thomas Hutchinson acknowledged the charter as the inviolable constitution of the province.

Runaway slave advertisements are a staple of African and African American Studies. For well over a century, they have provided scholars from many different disciplines a rich resource to examine slavery. In addition to recording slaves dogged determination to be free, their persistent efforts to preserve family ties, and their astute awareness of the politics of their day, advertisements for fugitive slaves include complex stories that reflect varied nuances of the past. It is those nuances that represent the focus of this article that explores bondage in colonial New England.

“Fear of Popish Leagues” weaves together various threads across the Atlantic from Scotland to Mexico and from Germany to the Caribbean to explore the makeshift diplomacy of Massachusetts Puritans and the Catholics from Acadia across confessional boundaries in the frontier environment of mid-Seventeenth Century America and in the context of civil wars in Europe.

Mystic Seaport Museum's Charles W. Morgan is an artifact of public history and a symbol of public memory recast to negotiate contemporary concerns from war and social crises to environmentalism. The historic whaleship is a potent vessel of memory whose changing meanings speak to the presence of the maritime past.