17th & 18th Century New England History

Based on the historical maps and documents, archaeologists should have found some trace of the Henry
Sampson House, if those traces still existed at the site after all of the years of occupation, building, and
rebuilding at the site. We did not find any definitive traces of the homesite. No architectural features like a hearth, cellarhole, or foundations. No trash dumps or trash scatters around the house. No traces of
any outbuildings like barns or sheds. A few of the artifacts could date back to the Sampson occupation, but they are just as likely to date to any occupation of the site dating to before the first quarter of the nineteenth century. We did find extensive evidence of Native American occupation at the site going back between 6000 and 3000 years ago. This, in itself, is a good indication that the Sampsons could have lived on the same site. Plymouth Colony homesites are always found at the same sites as previous Native occupation as both groups were using the same, best locations, locations that were high and dry with easy access to freshwater and other resources. The property is such a site and it has to be concluded that that the Sampsson homesite was probably either on the same location as the house demolished in 1984 or very close to it, close enough to have been destroyed when the present house was built. A ground penetrating radar survey confirmed extensive evidence of 20th century earthmoving as well as a rectangular feature initially hoped to be a cellarhole, but which turned out to be an unrecorded septic system.

Nations like narratives, lose their origins in the myth of time and only fully realize their horizons in the mind's eye. Such an image of the nation-or narration-might seem impossibly romantic and excessively metaphorical, but it is from those traditions of political thought and literary language that the nation emerges as a powerful historical idea in the west. Homi K. Bhabha / Nation and Narration Abstract In the quadricentennial of the founding of Plymouth Plantation, recent challenges in the United States politics and society raise critical questions on American identity and American democracy. Thus, calling for a revisit on the seventeenth century northeastern American experience of English colonizers, contemporary academia is engaged in new approaches and perspectives on American history and historicism, whereby a peculiar sense of past and act of remembrance count for present day cultural and political dilemmas across the United States. The legacy of early founders and pioneers of New England colonies provides a host of historicism on Anglo-American identity, which was elaborately imprinted in colonial accounts on material culture, legal, military, political and religious practices in the nexus of intra-and extra-imperial encounters of metropole and the colony itself.

The Abenaki and French attack on Oyster River Plantation (Durham, NH) was a climactic point in King William's War (1688-1697) in New England. Long portrayed as a unspeakable act of horror carried out by "half-starved savages," the attack on Oyster River was the result of a political power struggle among the Abenaki. The leadership that emerged repudiated the 1693 Treaty of Pemaquid and in the process interdicted English plans for an invasion of Canada. The internal Abenaki politics leading to the attack, the fragile nature of the Abenaki and French alliance, and the real strategic affects of the "Oyster River Massacre" are explored.

Plimoth Plantation is a living history museum located in Plymouth, Massachusetts, that portrays the early seventeenth-century lifeways of English Puritans and their Wampanoag counterparts through interactive encounters. The museum’s Wampanoag Homesite offers a glimpse into Wampanoag life prior to the arrival of the Pilgrims and touches on fraught Native interactions with the colonists, along with commentary on contemporary Native issues. Immediately upon entering the homesite grounds, visitors are immersed within a small re-created Wampanoag village and introduced to local Indigenous architecture, culinary traditions, and material culture. In addition, Native employees are onsite to educate visitors about Wampanoag history and to engage them in conversations about current events concerning Indigenous populations. This one-of-a-kind experience challenges preconceived cultural notions by drawing visitors into productive discussions that extend across equal cultural planes. Faced with modern declarations of Native self-representation and sovereignty, visitors might reconsider their own ideas about Native Americans as archaic, imaginary, or extinct.

The definition of "theocracy" has perplexed scholars for many centuries.  Some argue that theocracy exists only when religious leaders are also the actual, official political leaders and, as such, impose their particular theological views on the populace at large.  This essay argues that effective control of a polity by religious leaders and their theology is dispositive, regardless of the governmental organization that exists on paper.  For example, Roger Williams pointed out that in many theocracies (including that of seventeenth-century Massachusetts Bay) "the Magistrate is but the Ministers Cane through which the Clergy speaks . . . ."  "The Bloody Tenent Yet More Bloody" (London, 1652), 131.  The present essay was incorporated, with some additions and revisions, into Appendix B of Alan E. Johnson's book "The First American Founder: Roger Williams and Freedom of Conscience" (http://www.amazon.com/First-American-Founder-Williams-Conscience/dp/1511823712/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1436397728&sr=1-1).  For a summary of some of the points in this book, see the author's YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOlUZaehYk7WmwW8v9oBMzQ) about Roger Williams, including an interview (https://youtu.be/mGRl5lIbdYY) with the author about this book.

Note:  The sentence and citation on page 5, n.1, in this article referring to John M. Barry's book on Roger Williams should be qualified by Barry's remarks elsewhere in his book:  "Technically, the Bay was not a theocracy. Consistent with the admonition to render unto Caesar the things that were Caesar’s, and to God those which were God’s, the plantation prohibited a minister or church officer from simultaneously holding a government office. (For this reason some historians have argued that Puritan Massachusetts actually advanced the concept of separation of church and state.) But if not a theocracy, Massachusetts was theocentric."  Barry, Roger Williams, 169.  As discussed in this article, I disagree with the position that Massachusetts Bay was not a theocracy.

This paper presents an analysis of Native American identity and social networking within the central Connecticut region during the seventeenth century. This analysis is founded largely upon a regional collection of Native-Puritan land deeds (ca. 1660-1680) marked by groups of Native American representatives. As expressions of community, these deeds are examined from an ethnohistorical perspective, revealing a glimpse of the social network that interconnected communities throughout, and beyond, the region. The social structures behind this network are in evidence, including consensus in political decision-making, fluid identity between communities, a pronounced female association with land rights, and exogamous marriage-bonds.

On September 21, 1638, the Mohegans, the Narragansetts, and the English colonists on the Connecticut River reached an agreement at Hartford to settle their affairs following the Pequot War. The original copy of the treaty having been lost, scholars have depended almost exclusively on a copy prepared for the 1705 hearing of the Mohegan land case. However, this document represents only a fragment of the original agreement, leaving out four of the thirteen provisions agreed to by the parties in 1638. The original text of the treaty is reconstructed here by drawing on all of the surviving copies of the agreement: the 1705 copy already familiar to historians, a 1734 copy prepared during a later hearing of the Mohegan land case, and a newly rediscovered copy dating from 1665 and held among the British Library's Lansdowne Manuscripts. This reconstructed treaty illuminates how indigenous polities and English settlers sought to navigate the jurisdictional politics of early America. Moreover, it presents scholars with an important resource for reconsidering the evolution of Anglo-Indian relations in New England, particularly the breakdown of the relationship between the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the Narragansetts in the early 1640s.

Accessioned by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1941, an early eighteenth-century sleeved waistcoat of silk and metallic damask and brocaded satin is a rare survivor. In cut and construction, this visually striking garment trimmed with gold metallic braid and lined with taffeta and linen dates to about 1720. It would have been worn as part of a relatively new form of male dress, the three-piece suit. Extraordinary in its own right as a splendid example of textile design and historic fashion, the waistcoat does not appear to have undergone any later alteration, as is often the case with such early examples of eighteenth-century clothing. Its bold, exotic design, consisting of multicolor floral, foliate and abstract brocaded motifs, adorns both the front and back panels as well as the cuffs of the sleeves.

The waistcoat was acquired with a known provenance identifying its original owner, Ebenezer Storer, Sr., a Boston merchant born in Maine in 1699. In this paper, I treat Storer’s waistcoat as a foil for exploring the trans-Atlantic influence and circulation of European fashion in colonial New England, focusing specifically on Boston in the period spanning the 1680s through the 1730s. Critical consideration of these factors will be used to interpret the motivations for and consequences of owning such a garment during an important period of transition in New England’s colonial history. Storer’s waistcoat might well be cast as emblematic of this paradigm in its own right. Informed by European tastes and the likely product of the British silk industry in and around London, the waistcoat was worn and refashioned within the context of both an evolving spiritual tradition and a developing mercantile elite on the fringes of the British Atlantic world. The cosmopolitan nature of Boston’s merchant community and its conscious self-fashioning marked a significant departure from orthodox Puritan doctrine and theology. These differing perspectives and aspirations converged in New England, with changing opinions on dress helping to give rise to a new social order and civil society at the turn of the eighteenth century.

When Johan Maurits of Nassau, Governor-General of Dutch Brazil (1630-54), sent out expeditions against the maroons of Palmares, he was informed by his intelligence officers that the inhabitants followed the “Portuguese religion,” that they had erected a church in the capital, that there were chapels with images of saints and the Virgin Mary and that Zumbi, the king of Palmares, did not allow the presence of “fetishists.” Portuguese sources confirm that Palmares had a priest who baptized children and married couples and that its inhabitants followed Catholic rite, although according to Governor Francisco de Brito, they did so “in a stupid fashion.” Many more examples of the existence of Afro-Catholic elements in maroon communities in Latin America can be found. They question the widespread assumption that Catholicism had been forced upon all African slaves and that, even among those who seemingly embraced the colonizer’s faith, it functioned merely as a veneer underneath which their truly African, indigenous beliefs remained hidden. As the case of Palmares indicates, slaves did not necessarily wish to liberate themselves from all “Catholic ballast” once they ran away but sometimes remained strongly attached to it. 
This conclusion corresponds to the assumption by the Brazilian historian Marina de Mello e Souza that upon arrival in the Americas, many slaves did not perceive Catholic elements as something foreign since “Catholicism represented a link to their native Africa.” Souza is but one of several scholars who in recent years contributed to a shift in the study of black performance culture in the New World. The new paradigm essentially consists in the acknowledgment that our understanding of black performance culture can be bettered if we take into consideration that many Africans had already adopted certain European—predominantly Portuguese—cultural and religious elements before they were shipped as slaves to the Americas.
In the context of this shift, there has been an increased interest in Afro-Iberian brotherhoods (irmandades/hermandades) and confraternities (confrarias/cofradías). While it was long assumed that these so-called “black brotherhoods” were associated with slave culture on the Iberian Peninsula and in Latin America only, it can now be confirmed that Afro-Catholic fraternities also flourished in parts of Africa during the Atlantic slave trade era. As Linda Heywood has argued, “many Kongos and not a few Angolans had been Christians before their enslavement in Brazil. Thus they would have been familiar with the brotherhoods in Luanda, Soyo, and Kongo, and the central role they played in the creole society of Kongo, Angola and São Tomé.” Nicole von Germeten’s research on black brotherhoods in Mexico also concluded that “some Central Africans probably took part in social and religious brotherhoods and sisterhoods before crossing the Atlantic.” 
Ira Berlin also observed that black brotherhoods played a crucial role in the intercontinental networks that developed in the context of the transatlantic slavery. However, like most scholars, Berlin perceives brotherhoods as an essentially Iberian phenomenon that was crucial to the development of black identity the Iberian World, differing from North America, where “numerous informal connections between black people” developed, but not brotherhoods. Although Berlin confirms that slaves “created an intercontinental web of cofradias … so that, by the seventeenth century, the network of black religious brotherhoods stretched from Lisbon to São Tomé, Angola, and Brazil,” he believes that those slaves who ended up in Dutch, French or English colonies refrained from developing brotherhoods since there were no “comparable institutional linkages” that allowed them to do so. Berlin’s assumption thus presupposes that brotherhoods could only be established with institutional support and excludes the possibility that slaves themselves may have taken the initiative to create such organizations.
This article questions this conclusion and explores the possibility that slave organizations modeled upon Iberian brotherhoods have existed in North America. In doing so, it follows a reasoning by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Matt Childs and James Sidbury, editors of The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade (2013), according to whom “approved institutional structures authorized by the Catholic Church were not always necessary for Africans and their descendants to build fraternal structures.”  A first section provides an overview of the characteristics of Afro-Iberian slave brotherhoods. The following section presents a comparative analysis between king celebrations in Afro-Iberian brotherhoods and those at African-American Election Day and Pinkster festivals in New England and New York. The article ends with a reflection on the origins of Afro-Iberian cultural and religious elements among slave communities outside of the Iberian realm in the American diaspora.

A total of 52 square meters were excavated by volunteers supervised by the author. Excavations uncovered evidence for four phases of activity at the site: Native American occupation up to 6,000 years old; 17th century occupation by the Brewster family; 18th-19th century occupation by the Soule family; late 19th to early 20th century use of the site for sand extraction and refuse disposal by the Standish Hotel. Native American occupation took the form of debris from the manufacture of stone tools, completed projectile points from the Late Archaic and Late Woodland periods, a possible chunkey gaming stone, and a complete stone woodworking gouge. The house foundation that was uncovered is believed to either be the home of William Brewster that was successively lived in by his descendants and the then the Soule family, or to have existed on the same location as the house in which the Soules lived. It is believed to be a central chimney Cape Cod style house that may have been renovated later in its life. A limited quantity of artifacts dating from the 17th century (pipe stems, ceramics, bricks, window leads) were recovered. The Soule family's occupation of the site overlapped the earlier Native American and Brewster family occupations. The Soules appear to have added an ell onto the west side of the house as well as a French drain on the south side. They may have also rebuilt at least a portion of the chimney stack. After the last Soule to live on the property, Marshall Soule, had died, the site was abandoned and
eventually collapsed onto itself. In the late nineteenth to early twentieth century the property was
owned by the Standish Hotel who used it as a source of sand and gravel, resulting in the excavation of
at least three areas around and partially impacting the house foundation, and subsequent refuse disposal
into the extraction holes and onto the foundation. Overall, the site has a high research potential to provide information on early Plymouth Colony houses and households as well as everyday life of later 18th and 19th century farmsteads. The Native American component is one of the few that is recorded for the Nook and is potentially a significant source of information on pre-colonial use of Duxbury.

This report analyzes the archaeologically derived artifactual and architectural data gathered by Roland Robbins during his 1960 excavation at the John Alden site in Duxbury, Massachusetts and their subsequent interpretation by Mitch Mulholland in 1995. It is this author’s belief that the architecture of the site has been mis-interpreted for the past 40 years and that past artifactual analysis has dated the deposits in the cellar hole too early. It is this authors belief that the site does represent the home of John Alden of the Mayflower, but that it did not look like the way it has been popularly architecturally
interpreted and was, in fact, his home for most if not all of his life in Duxbury.

The house at 1 Thomas Street is situated on the western slope of a hillside leading from Allerton Street towards Murdock Pond. An article was published in the Harlow Family Notes issue No. 4, an informal publication of the Harlow Family Association, titled “A 1628 Pilgrim Rendezvous”, written by an anonymous Harlow Family Association member. The article claims that the house still standing at 1 Thomas Street, was a house or “rendezvous” built by Humphrey Turner and mentioned when Turner sold the property to Josias Winslow in 1633. The article further claims that the structure was built in 1628 and that it was owned and lived in by successive generations of the Thomas family, beginning with Major Nathaniel Thomas the third in 1699. Based on the cartographic, documentary, and preliminary architectural evidence, it appears that the house at 1 Thomas Street is not the same “rendezvous” mentioned in Humphrey Turner's record of sale to Josias Winslow in 1633.  Turner's rendezvous and palisade most probably did not survive too long, as it was probably erected as a temporary measure until more permanent accommodations could be made, and it is likely that no trace of it, nor even a remembrance that it ever existed, was attached with the property as it passed through various hands in the 17th and 18th century, ultimately being owned by John B. Thomas (possibly through inheritance from his father Joshua) in 1852. A thorough fishing search of the Plymouth County Registry of Deeds grantor and grantee records failed to find any record of the parcel being sold to either Joshuah or John B., but nevertheless, we know that he owned it by 1852 at the latest, and 1836, when Thomas was mentioned as owning land in the area.

The Salem witch trials have fascinated historians since the eighteenth century, but as Mary Beth Norton aptly states there is still “much of the complicated Salem story [that] remains untold.” Previous scholarship has
failed tell fully the story of the trials’ aftermath. In this paper, I follow the story of a group of witch trial victims and their families to illuminate the religious and political tensions after the trials ended in 1693. I argue that
reconciliation came only after the resignation of the Reverend Samuel Parris and the out-migration of the disaffected families to a new community. I discuss the emigration of the Nurse, Cloyse, and Bridges families to Framingham in light of conflict over the extension of church membership through the Halfway Covenant during the Reverend Thomas Green’s tenure in Salem Village. Green’s efforts to heal the parish were met with limited success because of the persistent factionalism in the community. After 1692, the religious and political conflicts in Salem Village provided the impetus for community formation and expansion in the new town of Framingham.

Starting in 1755, the French-speaking colonists of Atlantic Canada (known as the Acadians) were deported by the British. The expulsion was desired by the American colonists in New England but was opposed by the government back in England. In fact, the expulsion was enacted against the wishes of the Imperial government. Set against the backdrop of rising public debt in England, the costly expulsion of the Acadians (combined with the subsequent conquest of the French-speaking colony of Quebec) contributed to a change in policy course favoring centralization. Using public choice theory, I construct a narrative to argue that the Acadian expulsion contributed to the initiation of the American Revolution.

This article examines the voyage of the first 'American' transatlantic slave ship, which left Boston in 1644 and took on captives at Portudal in modern-day Senegal. Although John Winthrop recorded that the slavers massacred a large number of Africans and took many more as captives, documents from the High Court of Admiralty in London reveal that armed troops at Portudal actually repelled the slavers' effort to raid for captives. The fact that the raid was repulsed forces a reconsideration of the American slave trade of the seventeenth century.

The Pilgrim Avenue/ Cooke Memorial park property is the location of a suspected unmarked burial ground in Fairhaven. The park is located at the corner of Pilgrim Avenue and Cherry Street. Local tradition has maintained, since the late 19th century at the latest and possibly as early as the 1760s, that the park is the location of a burial ground within which Mayflower passenger John Cooke was buried upon his death in 1695. A ground penetrating radar survey found numerous anomalies across the entire park that were interpreted as possibly being evidence of an extensive burial ground. If all of the anomalies are in fact graves, the GPR appears to show that people forgot where earlier burials were located when later ones were dug, resulting in the pell-mell appearance of the burial ground with graves everywhere and every which way.  One of the things that noticed about the orientations of the anomalies was that they are predominantly aligned north to south, as opposed to the more traditional east to west consistent with most Christian burials.  As a summary of the site, I think it can be said with confidence that there was a burial ground at the site associated not with John Cooke, who never owned this land, but with William Wood, the property's 18th century owner. Cooke's burial place appears to be on a piece of land he owned in what is now Acushnet, as previous historians had surmised.

Makers Unknown: Material Objects and the Enslaved examines material culture to understand the ways in which the institution of racial slavery shaped the daily lives of all Rhode Islanders. Typically, historic archives preserve the objects and documents of prominent merchant families. When we reread these objects and archives to better understand the lives of the individuals whom they enslaved, we find within the gaps of the formal archives, new narratives. Makers Unknown represents the work of artisans of color whose contributions to their craft remain unrecognized. This is our starting point. The material culture produced by enslaved and free people of color for themselves or in their capacity as an unending source of coerced labor gives us a lens into their agency, humanity, and the many ways they negotiated freedom.

Pp. 83-88 [+ cumulative bibliography] in: "The Impact of New Netherlands upon the Colonial Long Island Basin. Report of a Yale-Smithsonian Seminar held at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, May 3-5, 1990."
= = = = = = =
This paper suggests that, in comparing phenomena of the New Netherlands in the Long Island Basin to phenomena elsewhere in the world, we should keep three perspectives in mind.

First, a historical perspective. America's New Netherlands, and its loss to the English, should be considered a minor component of the great Dutch miscalculation of the seventeenth century. The miscalculation was that Holland should invest most of its energy protecting its investment in the spice trade in the Netherlands East Indies. This decision proved a mistake because it was made just as the spice trade was about to decline. The Dutch made it an important goal to wrest Indonesia from English control. They succeeded in doing so and ceded to England places they felt were of lesser importance, such as India-which became the far more lucrative "jewel" in the British crown.

Second, a perspective on colonization and colonialism. There was nothing like the New Netherlands in Indonesia (the Dutch East Indies) until the liberal policies of the 1870s. Only in the 187os did the East Indies colonial structure begin to include farming villages. Before then, trading forts and civil servants populated the landscape, but were sparsely spread among a very large indigenous population. This was the opposite of the case in America's New Netherlands.

Third, a perspective on material evidence. A look at some of the range of lndonesian material culture demonstrating Dutch influence (architecture, boatbuilding, furniture, jewelry), and at other genres of lndonesian cultural expression (village design, language, statecraft, legal systems) might suggest new places to look for Dutch influence in American history as well.

Christianity is often portrayed as a negative influence on traditional indigenous community life. This was not always the case, particularly in New England, as a number of researchers have verified. Ongoing research into tribal histories in Connecticut west of the Connecticut River reinforces those findings. " Conversion " often resulted in free goods for tribal members, a white authoritative figure in close residency who could prevent white neighbors from stealing reservation resources or selling liquor to community members, and a school for learning English language, customs, and law. Most importantly, the processes and results of conversion could create a revitalization movement that promoted community cohesion and enhanced cultural identity. In this paper, I will present two case studies of the positive effects of Christianity on tribal peoples: the Schaghticokes in northwestern Connecticut, and the Wangunks in central Connecticut. Interestingly, the end result was two distinctive forms of Native American identity, tribal and supra-tribal.

This book is about Roger Williams (ca. 1603-83), who was banished from the colony of Massachusetts Bay for advocating freedom of conscience, separation of church and state, Native American rights, and related matters.  He founded the town of Providence in what became Rhode Island on the basis of full liberty of conscience and complete separation of religion and government.  For additional information, see the uploaded PDF and links.

The book is available in paperback and Kindle e-book editions at Amazon websites throughout the world.  The paperback is also available at some other websites and bookstores.

See also my YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOlUZaehYk7WmwW8v9oBMzQ) about Roger Williams, including an interview (https://youtu.be/mGRl5lIbdYY) with me about this book.

For Errata and Supplemental Comments, see the separate document uploaded at https://www.academia.edu/13798228/Errata_and_Supplemental_Comments_to_The_First_American_Founder_Roger_Williams_and_Freedom_of_Conscience.

Alan E. Johnson

Four sources of data were reviewed to determine some potential sites where 17th century homesites may be located.  Starting with Henry Fish's 1924 work Duxbury, Massachusetts Ancient and Modern, a list of 80  potential 17th century settler's homesites was created. Wentworth's history of Duxbury was then reviewed, but found that much of it was based on Fish, so was redundant. Local historian Lamont Healy's series of articles from the Duxbury Clipper were reviewed and  found very useful for locating the grants of a number of the early settlers. The MACRIS file gave me four 17th century standing houses. Fish's map was then overlaid with Google Earth satellite images and the Massachusetts Geographic Information System (GIS) online topographic and property files to generate maps that could be used to evaluate the potential of each of Fish's potential locations.

Tom R. Chambers created this photo album of Descendants of many of the First Settlers of Rhode Island to pay tribute to the trials and tribulations that their Ancestors were subjected to during the early to middle 1600s. It offers a unique look and study of the State's early history as it relates to images of Descendants (contemporaries) as icons or symbols to pay tribute to and talk about their Ancestors' (First Settlers') contributions through text extracted from The Genealogical Dictionary of Rhode Island (and other sources).

This report uses historical documents and town histories to reconstruct the layout and extent of the original Pilgrim village in Plymouth and assesses the archaeological potential of various possible house locations. It also examines the layout of the village as being based on the motte and bailey town development plan of Medieval England. Plymouth has been very built up since 1620 with some of the most noticeable changes probably happening in preparation for the 1920 celebration and in the 1960s when numerous 17th and 18th century buildings were destroyed in the name of progress. Overall, it would have to be said that the town has a horrible record for attempting to preserve any traces of its  Pilgrim past. There is probably no hope of ever finding any archaeological traces of any of the actual architectural portions of any of the original homes with the exception of the Standish/ Holmes house up on Burial Hill. If early occupation extended to Middle Street, if this was the north side of the palisade,
then traces of buildings and that palisade have the best chance of being identified in the town parking lot and along Carver Street. This is especially true if Coles Hill itself was outside the palisade, meaning that it may have run approximately where the west side walk is bordering Carver Street. This does not mean that evidence of the 17th century occupation of Plymouth does not exist. Traces of early buildings, buildings that represent the first phase of post-1627 expansion outside of the palisade may be present along North Street. The potential of this area was realized when PARP conducted an investigation behind 11 North Street and found colonial evidence going back to the 1630s. Unfortunately, most of the early buildings along this street probably fronted on the road, meaning that there is, again a high likelihood that most of the architectural traces are gone, but more yards exist in this area making it more likely that some of the backyards from the first half of the 17th century still exist here. To a lesser degree, the same may be said of the lots on Leyden Street. Traces of the palisade may be preserved in the back lots bordering Town Brook on the south side of the street and domestic and architectural refuse may be scattered about in any open space along Leyden Street. It would just take a lot of keyhole excavations to try to determine where any intact deposits were located. Any grassy spot or even any paved spot, could hold evidence of the first colonial settlement in town.

Hot Protestants: A History of Puritanism in England and America. By Michael P. Winship. Yale University Press,  2018. xiv +  351 pages. $28.00 (hardcover or e-book).
Philipp Reisner
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, lfaa009, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfaa009
Published:
07 April 2020

Citizens of the Commonwealth were given a rare opportunity to witness the investigation of part of Boston's earliest colonial past during the city's "Big Dig"/ Central Artery Project in 1985, when the Massachusetts Bay Colony's "Great House" was explored prior to the site's destruction. The Great House, located in City Square in Charlestown, was built in 1629 before Boston was even settled. It was to serve as the first residence of Governor Winthrop and the other prominent members of the company and as the colony's meetinghouse. Archaeologists assumed that it was to have been a formal, professionally designed structure symbolizing the hierarchical nature of the new settlement and serving as a link between the old and new worlds. Unfortunately, soon after the fleet's arrival, a great mortality swept the colony, which the settlers attributed to the brackish drinking water in the new settlement. The majority of them moved to Shawmut (now Boston) and reestablished the colony there, leaving the Great House to eventually serve as the meetinghouse for those who chose to remain. This report relates the background history of the site and its archaeological footprint and offers an alternate architectural interpretation of the layout of the building that fits better with its history and what is known about 17th century architectural traditions.

This paper explores the socio cultural response of the Schaghticoke Indians of Northwestern Connecticut to European contact.  The aboriginal territory of the Schaghticoke Tribe encompassed portions of the Housatonic watershed, including the northeastern edge of the Appalachian Highlands, known locally as East Mountain, Preston Mountain, and the Schaghticoke Mountains.  The present Reservation bounds still include part of this mountain range.  Specifically, the paper's focus is the effect of eighteenth century Moravian missionizing efforts on tribal solidarity.

This paper was written by UVM Emeritus Professor Z. Philip Ambrose, with whose blessing I am making it available on this platform. Ambrose, Z. P., “The Curriculum—I: From Traditional to Modern”, in Daniels, R. V. (ed.), The University of Vermont: The First Two Hundred Years 1991), 89–106