New Book Releases

Greenwich in the seventeenth century was a lost world with tythingmen and meeting warners, wild horse hunters, herdsmen, townsmen, pounders and planters.

Faced with an ever-changing environment, citizens set many new-world boundaries. Farmers created common fields along the coast and redesigned wilderness. They balanced religious and civic authority, private and common interests and financial inequities across communities. The first comers found it more challenging to please their own than it was to please their God. Their departure from the past fashioned an idealized, yet still imperfect, new society the Puritans proudly called the Greenwich Plantation. Author Missy Wolfe details the strategies and setbacks of creating community in colonial America's First Period.

Over fifty thousand Connecticut soldiers served in the Union army during the Civil War, yet their stories are nearly forgotten today.

Among the regiments that served, at least forty sets of brothers perished from battlefield wounds or disease. Little known is the 16th Connecticut chaplain who, as prisoner of war, boldly disregarded a Rebel commander's order forbidding him to pray aloud for President Lincoln. Then there is the story of the 7th Connecticut private who murdered a fellow soldier in the heat of battle and believed the man's ghost returned to torment him. Seven soldiers from Connecticut tragically drowned two weeks after the war officially ended when their ship collided with another vessel on the Potomac. Join author John Banks as he shines a light on many of these forgotten Connecticut Yankees.

Many know Rocky Hill as the home of the oldest operating ferry in the country and its renowned Dinosaur State Park. However, there is a lot more history that is seldom seen. Abigail (Smith) Grimes was the imposing matriarch who laid the foundation for the town. Elsie Rhodes was a hero in two wars, although her name today is only barely visible on a memorial. Eli Rodman was an African American man who served valiantly in the Civil War, although his surviving daughters were nearly cheated out of his estate. Even a bit of whimsy, like the story of Hayes Farm's hairless cows, reflects the hardworking agrarian roots of the local community. Join author and Town Historian Robert Herron as he uncovers the forgotten stories and personalities that bring this unique town's history into focus.

Author Christopher Pagliuco reveals the all-but-forgotten stories of these Connecticut heroes.

When Puritans Edward Whalley and William Goffe joined the parliamentary army against King Charles I in the English civil wars, they seized an opportunity to overthrow a tyrant. Yet when his son, Charles II, regained the throne, Whalley and Goffe were forced to flee to the New England colonies aboard the ship Prudent Mary--never to see their families or England again. Even with the help of New England's Puritan elite, including Reverend John Davenport, they struggled to stay ahead of the authorities in Boston, New Haven, and the outpost of Hadley, Massachusetts. Though forced to live out the rest of their lives fugitives, these former major generals survived frontier adventures in seventeenth-century New England, and became embedded in early United States history.

Connecticut's witch hunt was the first and most ferocious in New England, occurring almost fifty years before the infamous Salem witch trials.

Between 1647 and 1697, at least thirty-four men and women from across the state were formally charged with witchcraft. Eleven were hanged. In New Haven, William Meeker was accused of cutting off and burning his pig's ears and tail as he cast a bewitching spell. After the hanging of Fairfield's Goody Knapp, magistrates cut down and searched her body for the marks of the devil. Through newspaper clippings, court records, letters and diaries, author Cynthia Wolfe Boynton uncovers the dark history of the Connecticut witch trials.