Office of the Connecticut State Historian

After hearing tour guides tell visitors that Washington and Lincoln dined together in fashionable Society Hill, and that Benjamin Franklin wrote the first amendment to the Constitution five centuries ago, the Philadelphia City Council moved to require tour guides to pass a basic history test and pay a modest licensing fee. Incensed, the tour guides went to federal court, claiming infringement of their right to free speech. More 

Thanks to Alicia Wayland of Lebanon for forwarding this story. 

It's every archive researcher's dream: to find a document that will change history. In 1998, Thomas Lowry took a pen and made his dream come true. (Thanks to State Archivist Mark Jones for forwarding this story.) More .

The recently found bone fragment of the oldest domesticated dog found in the Americas shows that it had passed through a human's digestive tract. Researcher Samuel Belknap II from the University of Maine in Orono found the bone fragment while examining waste matter at a cave in southwest Texas . . .   More .

"God forbid" that the "powers that be" should forget how phrases from this text - produced by a committee of 54 - "take root" in our language. Apart from it's religious impact, the King James version contributed 257 idioms to our language. That's 157 more than Shakespeare. More

They said it, and they apparently mean it.  “Neglect and outright ill will have distorted the teaching of the history and character of the United States. We seek to compel the teaching of students in Tennessee the truth regarding the history of our nation and the nature of its government.”   More 

It was bad enough when the library auctioned off the 13 star flag and the invitation to Abraham Lincoln's inaugural, but when trustees started taking artifacts home without signing them out, Marietta Phillips decided she'd had enough . . . 

Two of America's leading historians are at odds over the relationship between history and popular memory of the past. Without mincing words, Gordon Wood has called Harvard historian Jill LePore on the carpet for her "academic contempt for the attempts of ordinary citizens to find some immediate and emotional meaning in the Revolution." More

       They spoke different languages,and came from different parts of the United States, Africa, and Haiti. But this week 200 years ago in January, 1811, Charles Deslondes and a make do army of 200 enslaved men took up hoes, axes, and cane knives to fight for freedom on the slave coast of Louisiana. 

       This was not a sudden explosion of anger, but a revolt that had been planned for years, in secret meetings in cane fields and taverns, at slave dances, and along slave communication networks that reached to the Caribbean. And it almost succeeded. More

One of the first acts of Georgia's new agricultural commissioner will be to remove murals depicting slaves planting and harvesting crops in 19th century Georgia from the state office building in which he works.. . .  Learn More 

Geraldine Doyle, who unknowingly was the model for the iconic World War II image of Rosie the Riveter, passed away last Sunday in Michigan. 

A New Year's Day cannon shot by National Park service officials at the Manassas (Bull Run) battlefield in Virginia, marked the beginning of a four year long commemoration of the Civil War's 150th Anniversary. Learn More . 

One thing seems clear, 146 years after the war ended, we're still very much divided over its meaning. Learn More

The former church in which state historical researchers and genealogists may some day conduct their investigations just got a vaguely familiar name.  Learn More