The article analyses a neglected aspect of the Salem witch-trials. It evaluates the roles of the Mathers, father and son, in securing the condemnation of George Burroughs. Their temporary acceptance of the validity of spectral evidence was justified by their belief that Satan must have employed powerful agents, not simply stereotypical witches, in his attempt to subvert godly Massachusetts.

For more than 370 years Roger Williams has been called a “Seeker,” a label pinned on him by his enemies in the 1640s. But, it is time to discard this erroneous term and accept him as he saw himself as a one of God’s “Witnesses in Sack-cloth.”

Massachusetts minister John Wise (1652–1725) was one of the foremost colonial apologists for the early “New England Way” in Congregationalist churches. But anachronistic labeling has distorted historical interpretations of his two main works. This article moves beyond the “‘democrat’/’‘conservative’ dichotomy” that has marred previous scholarship to offer a new, freshly contextualized reading.

In 1967, J. A. Leo Lemay disputed the editors of The Papers of Benjamin Franklin for discounting Franklin's authorship of “A Letter From Father Abraham to His Beloved Son.” A preponderance of evidence, including newly identified sources for the “Letter's borrowings,” now seems to favor Lemay's position, although differently than he had supposed.

Between 1845 and 1858, a mysterious New Haven, Connecticut, resident wrote letters to President James K. Polk and proslavery pamphlets under the pseudonym “Amor Patriæ.” Probing his writings for clues, this essay unearths the author's identity and chronicles the busy life that gave rise to his views on slavery, religion, and education.

Critics have long noted but never adequately explained why Jonathan Edwards deliberately reordered the Northampton revival's chronology in his Faithful Narrative . This essay argues that by declaring that Joseph Hawley's suicide signified the withdrawal of God's Spirit, Edwards sought to protect his community from the social, cultural, and theological ramifications of that self-murder.

Carefully reevaluating the available sources, this essay sheds new light on Cotton Mather's correspondence with German Pietist August Hermann Francke. Far from being a model of early modern cross-Atlantic intellectual exchange, theirs was just an intermittent, limited contact that, for many reasons, failed to grow into a mutually stimulating discourse.

Was Shays's Rebellion a sign of a general crisis of self-government in the new nation, or was it a peculiarly Yankee affair? This essay suggests that wrenching changes, growing out of the Revolution in Massachusetts, turned a conflict over taxes common to all the states into a unique and short-lived political upheaval.

Why have two portraits ostensibly of American Indians visiting England—a Penobscot woman circa 1605 and a Mohawk sachem circa 1740—been so frequently reprinted with misleading captions, when the woman, though anonymous, was in fact English and the man, often confused with an earlier Mohawk leader, never went abroad? Here are the answers.