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…
Category: Feature
Yale Indian Papers Project Awarded Second NEH Grant
The Yale Indian Papers Project has received a Scholarly Editions grant of $225,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to support “The New England Indian Papers Series: The State of Connecticut Collection, 1783-1869.” Slated to begin in the…
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…
Mapping the Landscape of Native New England
One of the more perplexing geographic features of southern New England is Dighton Rock, a 40-ton, 11½ by 5 foot sandstone boulder once located on the east side of the Taunton River in the present-day town of Berkely, Massachusetts. Nicknamed…
Mapping the Landscape of Native New England
Stiles’ map of the Connecticut shoreline shows the mouth of the Pequot River, today called the Thames, and the towns of New London, on the left bank, and a portion of Groton, on the right bank. Originally a village in…
This Week in New England Native Documentary History
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…