William Bradford

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.

Pence invoked them at the Republican debates, but a true reckoning with their history provides a different vision of the nation’s future.

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

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

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.

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.

Thanksgiving is a holiday about food – but it is more specifically a holiday about food’s absence.

When it comes to cicadas, the silence of the historical record can be deafening.

In New England, the birds were once hunted nearly to extinction; now they’re swarming the streets like they own the place. Sometimes turnabout is fowl play.

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.

Scholars are unraveling the myths surrounding the 1621 feast, which found the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag cementing a newly established alliance.

Pass the free enterprise, please.

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

They were not the nation's first settlers, but they were the most fractious.

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.

In 1625, New England’s “hideous and desolate” isolation suddenly began to seem a God-given blessing in disguise.

A new book explores how George Washington shaped the group of advisors as an institution to meet his own needs.