From the Editor's Desk

Abstract

Hello and welcome to the Fall 2022 issue! I hope you are reading this while enjoying good health for you and your loved ones. Our health, along with the cost of living, has been foremost on many people's minds this season. There's a small amount of comfort in knowing that people of the past had similar concerns. As you'll read about in our three articles this issue, they also lived in interesting times. This is exemplified in the lives of three men: Dr. Josiah Beckwith, a Litchfield doctor in the Civil War; Jared Ingersoll, a tax collector in pre-Revolutionary New Haven; and Thomas Thornton, a Puritan during the witch-crazes of seventeenth-century Connecticut.The first article, Peter C. Vermilyea's “The Army of Exempts,” is also the inspiration for the cover art. Both illustrate the treatment of Civil War medical exemptions in Connecticut. How did the past treat people with medical conditions and disabilities? What does this say about manhood and patriotism? How does society treat doctors who perform necessary medical duties with little appreciation? Vermilyea's article covers it all.This article leads nicely to Jon Kukla's treatment of “The Weathersfield Affair.” Going back in time, from the Civil War to the pre-Revolutionary period, Kukla's article covers more societal anxiety, this time around the rising concerns over British taxation, particularly the Stamp Tax in 1765. This societal anxiety was displaced onto a single figure, Jared Ingersoll. Questions of patriotic action, individual choice, duty, and the cost of living loom large Kukla's narrative article.And a hundred years earlier, anxieties over health and duty led to Thomas Thornton's obsession with witchcraft. His presence at many of the New England witchcraft trials have long been overlooked by other historians. As Katherine Hermes and Beth Caruso reveal, Thornton was a linchpin figure for the anxieties of the time. In a way, all three men were.Rounding out this issue, we have Gregg Mangan, Director of Digital Humanities at Connecticut Humanities, and Emma Wiley the Digital Humanities Assistant, guiding us through “Teach It,” a digital primary source resource for the social studies classroom. This goes beyond regular digital primary resources and is an entirely new way of thinking about Digital Humanities, and how to get Connecticut students engaging in critical thinking, digital literacy, historical reasoning, and having fun.As in each Fall issue, this issue also includes a report from Connecticut History Day. Despite the continuing pandemic, Connecticut History Day 2022 virtually brought together over a thousand middle and high school students, with many students continuing to the National Competition. The projects, as always, illustrate that history will be in good hands. Congratulations to all the students.Tying in nicely with the articles and archival holdings are a book review, and an exhibit review. The first is a review of Michael P. Winship's Hot Protestants: A History of Puritanism in England and America. Puritanism as a subject of historical inquiry is still going strong- as this review, and Hermes and Caruso's article show, there's a great deal more to learn. The second is a review of the Orange Historical Society's exhibit on SNET Telephones, offering a window into the lives of people during another technological shift.