In the summer of 1948, Woody Guthrie and his wife, Marjorie Mazia, were hired to be the directors of Stone Crest Camp, in Bethlehem, New Hampshire. In a letter addressed to “Dear Parents,” Marjorie wrote, “We are planning to make this summer camp season of 1948 a real treat for you, your children and for […]
Inside the Palmer Raids On Friday evening, January 2, 1920, federal agents and local police swept through eight New Hampshire cities and towns, searching for people they claimed were dangerous radicals. When the raids were over, nearly 300 New Hampshire residents, mostly immigrants from eastern Europe, were in custody, seized from private homes and meeting […]
When Mary Tompkins and Alice Ambrose arrived in Dover, New Hampshire, in 1662, you might say the Quaker missionaries were asking for trouble. They soon found it. Dover, which consisted of a settlement near what we now call Dover Point, was under the rule of strict Puritans, allied with the leaders of the Massachusetts Bay […]
When Arthur Bergeron returned to his hometown of Berlin, New Hampshire, after attending Dartmouth College and Harvard Law School, the city’s workers were agitating for change. The year was 1934, and the Great Depression had forced cutbacks in the paper industry that left the city reeling. The Brown Company, the city’s dominant economic power, had […]
Let come what will come, no man, be he priest, minister or judge, shall sit upon the throne of my mind, and decide for me what is right, true, or good.” Marilla Ricker, 1916, in I Don’t Know, Do You? Born in New Durham, NH in 1840, Marilla Young Ricker may have been destined to […]
After being fired from Hastings College for heterodox theology, Willard Uphaus ran the National Religion and Labor Foundation from 1934 to 1953, during which time he was active in international peace efforts and supported a variety of causes deemed suspect by the FBI and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). As the US-Soviet Cold War […]
Ona Marie Judge, enslaved in the household of Martha and George Washington, liberated herself by escaping to the Black community of Portsmouth in 1796. There, she gained shelter if not manumission, evading efforts by Washington to persuade or force her to return to his household. In an interview given to an abolitionist newspaper in 1845, […]
“Where Social Justice Meets Nature” Founded in 1941 as a summer retreat for people interested in peace, the World Fellowship Center now has eighty years of experience as a home away from home for radicals of various stripes. Spread out in a wooded campus of 455 acres on the edge of the White Mountains, World […]
Born in Milford, New Hampshire, in 1825, Harriet E. Adams Wilson is known as the first person of African descent to publish a novel in the United States. Wilson’s book, Our Nig; or Sketches From the Life of A Free Black, published in 1859, is believed to be closely based on her harsh experience in […]
The Abenaki inhabitants of the land we now call “New Hampshire” were left with few good options when Europeans began arriving to settle in the 17th century. With French settlements to the north, English settlers encroaching from the south, and sometimes hostile Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) to the west, the Abenaki at times forged alliances, at times […]
Never a radical institution, Dartmouth College nonetheless provided education for a number of people described elsewhere at NH Radical History. Nathaniel P. Rogers attended Dartmouth from 1811 to 1816. Playing football, he sustained an abdominal injury which affected him for the rest of his life and may have contributed to his death at an early […]
Born in 1806 in Candia, Sarah Bagley was a founder of the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association which led campaigns for shorter hours in the textile mills of the Merrimack Valley. Daughter of Nathan and Rhoda Withal Bagley, Sarah moved with her family to the Laconia area after her father bought land in Gilford in […]