Though she was an ordinary person, not a leader or organizer, Eliza Marsh's life shows the importance of rural women to abolitionism, and suggests this female contribution was undervalued, as men, preoccupied with personal honor, engaged in factional schism. Includes a previously unknown statement on feminism by William Lloyd Garrison.

‘Man the Reformer’ was the first of Emerson's works to be published in French translation. It appeared in a radical newspaper edited by the celebrated Polish author Adam Mickiewicz in Paris in 1849. This article is the first to examine this unique work, setting it in the context the revolutionary events of 1848-49.

The article prints a previously unpublished four-page letter that Emerson wrote in 1827, which details his impressions of Charleston, especially its religious and cultural institutions, during his visits there. The authors have mined Charleston newspapers and unpublished Emerson family correspondence to contextualize the letter as it sheds new light on Emerson's earliest southern sojourn.

Scholarly readings of seventeenth-century New England conversion narratives often miss the signs of regeneration that were very clear to contemporary church audiences. This article contains close readings of narratives from Thomas Shepard's Newtown church to bring out those signs and to restore the role of a godly audience to the process of gaining church membership.

Conventional wisdom holds that “Uncle” Sam Wilson—a Troy, New York, meatpacker who, when he was supplying troops during the War of 1812, stamped his crates “U.S.”—inspired the federal government’s nickname; new evidence suggests, however, that the personification originated earlier, simply as a creative and colorful expansion of “U.S.”

In 1921, Bolshevik-ruled Russia suffered a famine affecting over 37 million people. In Boston, Henry (Harry) Wadsworth Longfellow Dana, grandson of the famous poet, and Russian-Jewish immigrant Isidore Levitt, responding to writer Maxim Gorky’s appeals for relief, established the Gorki Fund. Using newly discovered archival materials, the article relates its story.

Boston medical students trained in Paris in the 1830s repudiated “heroic” practice (bleeding, drugging, purging) in therapeutics. When James Jackson Jr. encountered a supposed miracle treatment—saline injections bringing cholera patients back from the brink of death—he dismissed it as another heroic remedy. Viewed in historical context, that conclusion seems justified.

The Secret Six, the Northern men who supported Brown's assault on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, were committed to shielding themselves. After the Civil War, however, their agent, Franklin Sanborn, in advocating for a “true account” of the event in letters reprinted here, identified its main, and some supporting, actors.

Haunted by the possibility that Edgar Allan Poe wrote a long-forgotten verse satire published in the September 1835 issue of the New England Magazine , the author of this essay launches an investigation to rid himself of his obsession.

In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson appointed Tench Coxe Purveyor of Public Supplies. Using the considerable patronage at his disposal, Coxe aggressively promoted private military manufacturers, thus arguably now giving the U.S. the ability-when it had already long had ample reason-to declare war against England in 1812.

Cotton Mather had a conflicted relationship with his alma mater, Harvard College. His efforts to influence education in Cambridge are illustrated through three documents critiquing the quality of education at the college, illustrating Mather's efforts to become president, and teaching his matriculating son proper methods for study and piety.

Religion permeated all aspects of New England Puritans’ lives, but it was curiously absent from their marriage ceremonies. In response to political changes brought about by the Dominion of New England, however, colonists increasingly shunned secular weddings, now performed by Crown appointees rather than elected Bay officers, and embraced religious ceremonies performed by local ministers.

The Project for the Preservation of Congregational Church Records collects, catalogs, preserves, digitizes, and transcribes documents that lie scattered in Congregational and Unitarian churches throughout the commonwealth. Cuffee's “Relation,” one slave's spiritual account conveyed in his own words and by his hand, is among the many extraordinary treasures the project seeks to safeguard.

Through membership documents, this essay traces the decline in African American affiliation with Massachusetts Congregational churches-from the pre-Revolutionary era, when enslaved blacks, such as Cuffee Wright, routinely joined Congregational churches, to 1828–32, when four African Americans applying to Lyman Beecher's Boston church were among the last wave of blacks seeking membership in northern white churches.

The attractive little poem “The Pasture“ has a surprisingly prominent place in the Frost canon. One “versed in New England things,” however, will pause over the chore described in the second stanza, the fetching of a calf from its mother, and make more of the poem than a fond memory.

Emily Dickinson's references to the nineteenth-century science of bridge building culminate in two major bridge poems that apply technical knowledge to transcendent concepts to produce powerful statements of faith. Transforming the technological sublime into the religious sublime, Dickinson captures the mystery of the transition from life to death.

In mid-eighteenth-century Boston, Mather Byles Sr. gave almanacs to his daughters to use as diaries and commonplace books. This collection, now residing in Ottawa, offers a rare glimpse into the everyday musings of two colonial American girls and highlights the importance of annotated print, a frequently neglected historical source.

In 1915, Dr. George E. Cragin delivered a candid (and heretofore unpublished) lecture to the Oneida Medical Club on male continence, or coitus reservatus , a practice supporting the Oneida Community’s concept of complex marriage, or free love. A portion of a published article to which Cragin alludes, containing an account by one disaffected woman member, is offered in counterpoint.

In 1839, Edgar Allan Poe insisted that, though Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had “high qualities,” his reputation would not survive into the future. Poe's seemingly prescient prediction reveals a good deal about Longfellow's practice as a poet as well as Poe's contribution to the development of both modernism and popular culture.

In 1869, African American author Frank J. Webb returned to Washington, D.C., to become a “Carpetbagger” in the Reconstruction South. In a letter to black Bostonian Robert Morris, Webb illustrated the richness of antebellum African American reform networks and portrayed one man’s boundless optimism for race relations in postbellum America.