During one hot summer at the end of the seventeenth century, the weather in Westerly, Rhode Island became unbearable and caused a drought. This prompted a group of Narragansetts living nearby to turn to their cultural practices for a remedy…
Category: Collections
This Week in New England Native Documentary History
Increase Mather, in his A Brief History of the Warr with the Indians in New England (Boston, 1676), wrote that the Native people “amongst whom we live, and whose Land the Lord God of our Fathers hath given to us…
This Week in New England Native Documentary History
Written from Saybrook at the end of June 1649, John Mason’s letter to the Commissioners of the United Colonies captures the unsettled nature of Indian affairs a decade after the end of the Pequot war. It is a world of…
Shoat
shoat, n., a young weaned pig. Possibly Flemish in origin, the use of the word shoat first appears in the English language in the mid- 15th century. Shoat has the secondary transferred meaning of an idle, worthless person. It is this…
This Week in New England Native Documentary History
” . . . our English Fathers inform us that we are Considered by them as being Subjects to the Laws and Civil regulations of this Colony . . .” ” . . . the most of us have .…
Hurly-burly
hurly-burly, n., Tumult, commotion, strife, uproar, turmoil, confusion (formerly a more dignified word than now). Hurly-burly first appears in the English language by the mid-sixteenth century. While most often found as a noun, it has an adjectival and adverbial form, and, for a…
New Feature
A foray into the indecipherable, neglected, uncommon or forgotten words found in the documents of the Yale Indian Papers Project During the course of transcription, editors are faced with a number of challenges, most of which center…