Thomas Morton

Why Thomas Morton seems to have taken particular delight in driving the Pilgrims and Puritans out of their minds.

When we think of early New England, we picture stern-faced Puritans. But in the same decade that they arrived, Morton founded a very different kind of colony.

From early New England to the present day, censors have acted out of fear, not prudishness.

The Puritans outlawed Thomas Morton's "New English Canaan" because it was critical of the society they were building in colonial New England.

The Puritans had little tolerance for those who didn't conform to their vision of the world.

The Northeast caught fire this fall, in a way that recalls its past. History has some lessons about how to manage the region’s fire seasons to come.

A new book sets out to discover how Americans became such creatures of the seven-day week.

Coming to love Puritan poetry is an odd aesthetic journey. It's the sort of thing you expect people partial to bowties and gin gimlets to get involved with.

In Massachusetts, the inclusion of Native American names and places in local geography has obscured the violence of political and territorial dispossession.

Historian John Turner tells the story of Plymouth Colony with nuance and care.

The word “Plymouth” may conjure up visions of Pilgrims in search of religious freedom, but that vision does not reflect reality.

It was less about their asceticism and more about rejecting the world they had fled.

Power, plague and Christianity were closely intertwined in 17th-century New England.

Descendants of the Pilgrims have highlighted their ancestors’ role in the country’s founding. But their sanitized version of events is only now starting to be told in full.

Without the bawdy world of Falstaff and Prince Hal and of Shakespeare’s jesters, there would have been nothing for those dissenting Puritans to dissent from.