In October of 1761, Ezra Stiles and a companion, Rev. Nicholas Street, explored the remains of an old Quinnipiac fort, which once stood on a hill at the east end of East Haven’s burying yard. As the pair walked…
Author: Paul Grant-Costa
This Week in New England Native Documentary History
1690 was a bad year for Nathaniel Niles. Three times he was taken captive by French Indians and twice had his property plundered, all within a span of sixteen months. By the fall of 1691, as King William’s War continued,…
Book Notice: Leviathan
Understanding the British Empire can be particularly challenging for American scholars, especially those of us whose work often intersects with some aspect of its long influence on Native American history. Most helpful in making sense of British history is David…
Book Notice: For Adam’s Sake
We want to call attention to our friend and colleague Allegra di Bonaventura’s new book For Adam’s Sake: A Family Saga in Colonial New England, which traces the astonishing story of five families in the first one hundred years of…
This Week in New England Native Documentary History
On September 9, 1772, Abigail Meason, an itinerant Indian woman from Farmington, Connecticut, appeared in Northampton, Massachusetts at the doorstep of Nathaniel Day and his wife Experience with a growing temperature. The Days recognized the symptoms as “slow fever” or…
The Mark of Gideon
By 1752, the Schaghticoke community near Kent saw its considerable land base taken by its colonial neighbors. Reduced to a small piece of land between the Housatonic River and Pachgatgoch Hill, its planting grounds were not capable of supplying corn…
Living in Two Worlds
In the late 17th and 18th century, the Wangunk village consisted of two parcels of land on the eastern side of the Connecticut River in what was then East Middletown (present-day Portland), Connecticut, as well as scattered plots in Wangunk…