Nearly 150 years after the Puritans wrote laws granting themselves unprecedented rights, Boston’s Black Freemasons petition for freedom - claiming the rights denied to them from the start of the colony. In the Revolutionary era, they wrote, it was a bitter irony that they were “detained in a state of slavery in the Bowels of a free Christian Country.” Historian Chernoh Sesay Jr. offers a brilliant account, shedding light on the complicated relationship between tyranny and liberty.

Historian and Narragansett tribal member Mack Scott explores the world of 17th century Narragansett Country - where people as diverse as Pokasset sunksqua Weetamoo, Roger Williams and Anglican William Blackstone, found sanctuary and self-determination. What new political and diplomatic allegiances were formed in the Dawnland? What can we learn about creating sanctuaries today?

If you couldn’t vote in elections, you voted with your feet. Award-winning historian Margaret Newell, author of Brethren by Nature, tells the story of the 17th and 18th century people who rejected tyranny and ran away - fleeing slavery with the help of a wide underground network of Indigenous and Black people. Egypt Lloyd, co-founder of the Slave Legacy History Coalition and descendant of enslaved people in Cambridge, joins this exploration of claiming liberty, along with historian Linford Fisher as moderator.

Aquinnah Wampanoag citizen, educator and author Linda Coombs delves into the true meaning of sovereignty and governance as being in balance with the earth - as practiced by Native people for thousands of years until colonization. in the Eastern Woodlands, Puritan liberties meant tyranny for Native people - the disruption of their relationship to the land and of Indigenous lives. It’s a denial of rights that continues today.

Imagine a world in which political leaders retire gracefully after electoral defeat, in which voting rights are expanded, not restricted, and where there’s free and vigorous debate. Welcome to 17th century New England, where the Puritan colonists developed, for the majority of free white men but not women, Natives or Black people, the most radical society in the English world. As Americans prepare to go to the polls, what legacy did the Puritans leave us? Award-winning historian Francis J. Bremer explores Puritan history, warts and all.

The tyranny of Charles I, royal prerogative and decrees, arbitrary taxation, entrenched inequality - all this and more the Puritans tossed overboard as their ships set sail not just for what was for them a new world, but a new polity. Award-winning historian David Hall, Harvard Divinity School, explores the politics of 17th century England and the religious and social context that drove the Puritans to create a wholly new society.

How did Boston, Massachusetts, get its name? Historian Neil Wright looks to the American city’s prequel: the small town of Boston, Lincolnshire, on the east coast of England. Today known as the town which voted overwhelmingly for Brexit, Boston has a storied history: as a major player in the Hanseatic League, a medieval port, and the origin of many of the Puritan colonists who settled on the Shawmut peninsula and named it for their hometown.

Which story of the Salem witch trials do we know? Two curators, witchcraft experts at the world renowned Peabody Essex Museum, explore the different ways the Salem trials are remembered, and how that reflects our understanding of magic, witchcraft and gender today.

Emelie Gevalt, curator at the American Folk Art Museum, explores black presence and absence in early New England art - and what it tells us about the particular nature of New England slavery, simultaneously intimate and distanced, centred in households and shared space. This presentation is based in part on Emelie Gevalt’s curated exhibition, widely acclaimed, Unnamed Figures, at the American Folk Art Museum and Historic Deerfield.

“It’s as though people have come out from the shadows,” commented a local historian about her groundbreaking project, Recovering Black History. To date it’s discovered the names and lives of nearly 500 members of the Black community in southern New Hampshire - an area thought of as white. This workshop, led by superb local historians, shows you how you, too, can undertake the research in your town and change the way we understand our histories.

Who do we remember - and who do we forget? Join archaeologist Gail Golec and descendant Ray Brooks in tracking down the forgotten story of four generations of the Brooks family and, in so doing, revealing a hidden past of New England’s black community. Part of a larger project on recovering black history run by the Monadnock Center for History and the Historical Society of Cheshire County, New Hampshire.

Join us for a fascinating dig into the past as we open the door to the Bradstreets' North Andover home - and welcome you to a crucial part of the history of Anne Bradstreet, North America's first published poet .

Economic historian Dror Goldberg offers a fascinating look at a little known facet of New England history: how the Puritans, forced by circumstance and enabled by their intellectual and administrative abilities, invented modern currency. Despite resistance - shopkeepers refused to accept the new bills - the new money took hold, and revolutionised the (financial) world.

Harvard PhD candidate Aabid Allibhai offers stunning new research showing just how entwined the Boston area elite was with slavery. Joined by former member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives Byron Rushing and the Rev. Mary Margaret Earl, he takes our enslavement series up to the 21st century, asking: how does this past affect us today?

Historian Richard Boles takes us back to a world in which Puritan theologians could at once justify slavery and see enslaved people as spiritual equals in heaven. This trenchant, in-depth lecture explores the theological underpinnings of New England slavery, the ways in which religion laid the groundwork for a rejection of slavery in the post-Revolutionary period, and how enslaved people made their churches their own.

From the time of Columbus’ arrival to 1900, up to 5 million Indigenous people in were enslaved in the Americas. How have we overlooked this crucial fact of history, and how does New England fit in? Historian LInford Fisher, Cheryll Toney Holley (Nipmuc), Alexis Moreis (Wampanoag), and Loren Spears (Narragansett) tell the story of Indigenous people in New England and how they have both survived and thrived - a story now being documented in a remarkable new project at Brown University.

The Pequot War - the first major conflict between English colonists and Native people in New England - made slavery a fundamental part of colonial Massachusetts. Puritans enslaved captured fighters, women and children, and kept them in New England or sold them to the Caribbean. Award-winning historian Margaret Newell was joined by Michael Thomas, board member of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum, and Rashad Young, Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation.

We think of New England as the land of the free - a place of abolitionism and liberty. Yet slavery began here in the very first years of the colony, as part of a range of unfree labor practices and reflecting the deep European belief in the rightness of hierarchy. By the end of the 17th century, nearly 15% of Bostonians were enslaved people, while many more worked throughout the region. The first to legalise slavery in its 1641 Body of Liberties, New England built its power and wealth on slavery and a growing trade with the slave islands of the Caribbean.

Did the American Revolution emerge out of thin air - or was there a deep culture of self-government and resistance to tyranny already embedded in New England? This illuminating and engaging presentation by historian Adrian Chastain Weimer takes you into the roots of a profound constitutional culture developed by the Puritans in the 17th century - a century before the Revolution. A uniquely insightful look at early New England political culture.

Renowned historian Emerson Baker explores the fate of 400 Scottish prisoners of war, captured by Cromwell, shipped across the sea, and sold into indentures to work in ironworks and sawmills - the first major group of unfree labor to build New England.

The Massachusetts flag and seal are based on 17th century imagery, a Native man at the center. Is it time to question it? Three representatives of a campaign to change the flag say yes.

Photographer Sandra Matthews and Indigenous activist David Brule explore the meaning of the Massachusetts landscape, past and present. How did people who occupied land 400 years ago call it home? What does that mean today?

Join a unique, “what if” exploration of history as scholar Lori Rogers-Stokes explores the hidden commonalities between Indigenous society and Congregationalism and asks: what if they had realised the values they held in common?

Award-winning historian Emerson Baker explores a part of “Puritan New England” that was neither new, nor Puritan, nor wholly English. A fascinating look at a multiethnic, mingled early New England.

The Eastern Pequot survived the horrors of the Pequot War and settled in a small reservation in what is today Connecticut. Stephen Silliman of UMass Boston, and Natasha Gambrell, Eastern Pequot, both of the Eastern Pequot Field School, tell the story, through archaeology, of a remarkable persistence in time, culture and community.

The survival of dozens of title deeds in Plymouth Colony underpins scholar Dr. Jeremy Bangs’ charting of the colonists’ stripping of Native people of their land. Deed after deed documents the transfer of Indigenous future as Dr. Bangs explains the reasons for it and concludes, controversially, that Native people owned their land.

Dr. Frank Waabu O’Brien, Abenaki, offers remarkable insights into Native placenames in southern New England in this powerful presentation. Naming and power go hand in hand in New England’s past, as this important discussion explores issues of culture, domination, language survival and the implications today. Rashad Young, Mashantucket Pequot and teacher of the Pequot language, provides expert commentary.

For the gift of land, Native people in early New England accepted a sacred role as its caretakers - a far cry from the view of 17th century colonists. Watch this powerful presentation at the Boston Public Library by Lance Young (Eagle Wolf), sachem of the Nemasket Nation, as he explores the meaning of place for Native people, past and present.

Mary Rowlandson’s bestselling account of her captivity during King Philips War influenced generations of history books, telling a story of cruelty, terror and hardship. Pocasset saunkskwa Weetamoo, she said, was cruelest of them all. But was Weetamoo cruel - or was she, for her people, courageous? In this re-reading of Rowlandson, and with the help of Lisa Brooks’ Our Beloved Kin, we began to see a wider story.

William Apess, 19th century Pequot author, activist and minister, turned New England history upside down and insisted on the equal rights of Native people. Here we looked at his Eulogy on King Philip, a revolutionary view of the bloodiest war in American history, and the man at its center, reviled by colonists but restored as a great man by Apess.