Massachusetts Bay Colony

King Charles Forces the Puritans to America

Persecuted as “heretics,” the Puritans emigrated to Massachusetts, where Governor John Winthrop hoped to create a “Citty upon a Hill.”

Editor’s Note: After a distinguished career as a journalist, television commentator, and president and editor-in-chief of Congressional Quarterly, Robert Merry turned to writing history.

The Rebels Of Merry Mount

Carleton Beals | June 1955

Thomas Morton liked the lush country, the Indians liked Thomas—and the stern Puritans cared little for either

Profits in the Wilderness

John Steele Gordon | July/August 1992

History, like most aspects of human existence, has fashions that come and go. In the nineteenth century, the Great Man theory was very popular. Columbus was certain he could reach the Orient by sailing toward the setting, not rising, sun.

The Therapy of Distance

Daniel J. Boorstin | June 1976

The broad expanse of ocean that separated Plymouth from Mother England helped create a novel experiment in democracy that grew as the American colonies expanded.

Anne Hutchinson Versus Massachusetts

Wellington Newcomb | June 1974

She was, said Governor Winthrop, an American Jezebel

It would have been no pleasant thing for any defendant to hear John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts colony, declaim the serious charges brought against Anne Hutchinson at her trial in 1637.

When Christmas Was Banned In Boston

Dana P. Marriott | December 1967

Many a book, a magazine, a play, a movie, has been banned in Boston. But Christmas?

The Pilgrims and The Rock

Francis Russell | October 1962

Did the Fathers in 1620 really land on that famous slab of granite? Through the haze of myth that surround it, a profound truth may be dimly seen

Above the rush of wind and water could be heard their hymns of praise as they sprang from the shallop onto the rock, the stern-faced men in wide-brimmed pot hats, the women modestly poised between this world and the next.

“My Beloved And Good Husband…”

Darrett B. Rutman | August 1962

Thus Margaret Winthrop to her spouse, the governor of the Bay Colony. Her letters—and John’s in reply—reveal behind the cold Puritan exterior a warm and deeply touching relationship

The Money-maker

Robert N. Linscott | February 1960

How far back in American history can we find the old shell game in operation? Alas, pretty far.

It is as old as money, or the shortage thereof. Even the first Puritan settlers of New England were able to let their eyes stray from regarding Zion to study the money problem, which was, Heaven knows, acute in those days.

Zion In The Forest

Roger Burlingame | June 1956

Roger Williams liked Indians and almost everyone else, and he founded a colony that gave our freedom a broader horizon

There is a legend about Roger Williams that is exceedingly popular among Americans. There is also a truth which is slowly emerging from the welter of fancies. The truth is less simple than the legend, for most legends are oversimplifications. But it has some even more dramatic aspects than the beloved myth and it accords better, too, with the mental development of the normal human being. If it dims the halo of this pioneer of American liberty, it gives him a warmth, a nearness to ourselves that we could hardly feel while he stood on the pedestal.

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Featured Authors

Ambrose, Stephen E.

Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002) was a historian and professor who wrote on military history, presidential history, and American expansion and foreign policy. Ambrose has been praised for his biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and for helping to galvanize interest in World War II.

Atkinson, Rick

Rick Atkinson is the author of dozens of best-selling books on American military history, including The Long Gray Line, a narrative saga about the West Point class of 1966; Crusade, a narrative history of the Persian Gulf War, and In the Company of Soldiers, an account of his time with General David H. Petraeus and the 101st Airborne Division during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He has also written a three-part narrative history of the U.S.

Bird, Kai

Kai Bird is a historian and Executive Director of Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York. He is best known for writing about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, US-Middle East relations and biographies of political figures. Bird is the author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book is The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Blight, David W.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.

Brands, H. W.

H. W. Brands is a best-selling author, historian, and the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair at the University of Texas at Austin. He has written thirty books, including The Zealot and the Emancipator, a dual biography of the abolitionist John Brown and President Abraham Lincoln, as well as The First American and Traitor to His Class, both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Prize.