HUB History - Our Favorite Stories from Boston History

Was Cotton Mather a victim of 18th century cancel culture? In December 1719, Bostonians were astounded at the spectacle of the northern lights dancing in the sky, a sight that nobody alive could remember seeing before. One of the Bostonians who watched in astonishment was Cotton Mather. Confronted with this unprecedented natural phenomenon, Mather was torn. His instinct was to see signs and portents in the aurora borealis, but the world around him was changing, and his fellow natural philosophers were more likely to see the clockwork rules of Newtonian physics than the hand of God or the devil moving the universe around them. Mather’s report focuses on the secular experience of the phenomenon, but had he really changed his tune, or was he following the new political correctness of the modern era?

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The Mather Borealis

• Cotton Mather’s A Voice From Heaven: An Account of a Late Uncommon Appearance in the Heavens
• Thomas Robie’s Account of the First Appearance of the Aurora Borealis
• Thomas Prince’s Account of the Northern Lights when first seen from England, 1716
• William Whiston’s An Account of a Surprizing Meteor, Seen in the Air, March the 6th, 1715/16
• Greenwood, Isaac. “An Account of an Aurora Borealis Seen in New-England on the 22d of October, 1730, by Mr. Isaac Greenwood, Professor of Mathematicks at Cambridge in New-England. Communicated in a Letter to the Late Dr. Rutty, R. S. Secr.” Philosophical Transactions (1683-1775), vol. 37, 1731
• Winship, Michael P. “Prodigies, Puritanism, and the Perils of Natural Philosophy: The Example of Cotton Mather.” The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 51, no. 1, 1994
• Gardener, Andrew G. “Mumbo Jumbo Meets its Match.” The Colonial Williamsburg Journal, Autumn 2010
• Soth, Amelia. “When the English Witnessed Battles in the Sky.” JSTOR Daily, October 29, 2020
• Samuel Green’s paper on the 1719 aurora and the lack of newspaper accounts
• Benjamin Trumbull’s A century sermon, or Sketches of the history of the eighteenth century. Interspersed and closed with serious practical remarks. Delivered at North-Haven, January l, 1801.
• Perley, Sidney, Historic Storms of New England, 1891
• April 2023 New England aurora
• April 2023 New England aurora
• November 2023 New England aurora

Isaac Greenwood 1730 My dad 1980s My dad 1980s My dad 1980s My dad 1980s