Nine Squares in a “Wilderness”: The Mysteries of Early New Haven

If the English Puritans who colonized New England in the 1630s had an enemy they could all agree on, it was Spain and Spain’s enormous New World empire. Yet the town that some of these Puritans founded near the place where the Quinnipiac River meets Long Island Sound looked nothing like the other English towns of New England. It looked like Spanish towns in the New World. This talk explores this and other mysteries about New Haven’s founding, including the question of where its English name came from, and why its colonists imagined they were entering a “wilderness.” The speaker, Mark Peterson, Edmund S. Morgan Professor of History at Yale, has worked extensively on Puritan New England. His most recent book, The City-State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power, 1630–1865 (2019), has been called ‘breathtaking’ and ‘ingenious.’ Lecture made possible through the valued support of Bruce R. Peabody, Esq. and the Herzan Lecture Fund. Originally presented at a New Haven Preservation Trust event in the Center Church on the Green on November 10, 2022.