Written from Saybrook at the end of June 1649, John Mason’s letter to the Commissioners of the United Colonies captures the unsettled nature of Indian affairs a decade after the end of the Pequot war. It is a world of…
Category: Feature
Inside a Connecticut Indian Wigwam
In the fall of 1761, Ezra Stiles visited the Western Niantic Indian community in the Niantic-East Lyme, Connecticut area. Of the several Indian dwellings or wigwams standing there, he made sketches of two in particular, that of George Waukeets and Phoebe…
Shoat
shoat, n., a young weaned pig. Possibly Flemish in origin, the use of the word shoat first appears in the English language in the mid- 15th century. Shoat has the secondary transferred meaning of an idle, worthless person. It is this…
Mapping the Landscape of Native New England
Ezra Stiles (1727-1795), the influential minister, scholar and president of Yale College, had a knack for writing things down. Nothing escaped his attention. His notebooks, journals, and correspondence often included the Native world around him. This world fascinated Stiles, who…
This Week in New England Native Documentary History
” . . . our English Fathers inform us that we are Considered by them as being Subjects to the Laws and Civil regulations of this Colony . . .” ” . . . the most of us have .…
Hurly-burly
hurly-burly, n., Tumult, commotion, strife, uproar, turmoil, confusion (formerly a more dignified word than now). Hurly-burly first appears in the English language by the mid-sixteenth century. While most often found as a noun, it has an adjectival and adverbial form, and, for a…
New Feature
A foray into the indecipherable, neglected, uncommon or forgotten words found in the documents of the Yale Indian Papers Project During the course of transcription, editors are faced with a number of challenges, most of which center…