The history of Connecticut is a complex mix of diverse settlement, religious change, political conflict, economic development, and uneasy accommodation of the natural environment. The state has a long industrial past as its numerous rapid rivers and streams hosted diverse mills and factories. The dominant river, the Connecticut, which flows from northern New Hampshire through Massachusetts and Connecticut to the Long Island Sound, divides the state almost equally in half. Large cities and urban sprawl contrast with arcadian hamlets, dense forests, and mountainous regions. Nestled among three industrial states — Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and New York — Connecticut has been at times been influenced by religious conservatives, wealthy industrialists, and liberal politics. The southernmost New England state, Connecticut has a long shoreline, good harbors, and busy ports. From the seacoast one spies Long Island across the Sound. The many waterways of Connecticut have influenced the region’s history. Indian tribes, such as the Pequot and Nipmuck, used birch-bark or dugout canoes to travel the rapid rivers and streams taking them to war and to hunt. Dutch and English explorers sailing Long Island Sound looking for likely ports and inland passageways were intrigued by the many harbors formed at the mouths of Connecticut’s many rivers. Settlements soon developed at these locations, such as at New London on the Thames River, New Haven on the Quinnipiac, Bridgeport on the Housatonic and Pequonnock, Stamford on the Rippowam, Greenwich on the Greenwich and Horseneck rivers, and inland, Hartford on the Connecticut. Dutch explorer Adriaen Block sailed up the Connecticut in 1614, and Dutch traders later established a post at Hartford. English colonists from Massachusetts Bay were likewise attracted to the fertile rivers of Connecticut. During the mid-1630s English settlers under the command of John Winthrop, Jr., son of the governor of Massachusetts and noted scientist, wrested control of Connecticut from the Dutch. A few years later, Thomas Hooker led dozens of Puritan families from Massachusetts Bay colony to Hartford to establish a new Puritan commonwealth. Eventually the colony of Connecticut included the towns of Windsor, Wethersfield, and Hartford. Hooker and other Puritans formulated one of the founding documents of early America, the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, in January 1639. “Forasmuch,” they wrote, “as it hath pleased the Allmighty God by the wise disposition of his divyne providence so to Order and dispose of things that we the Inhabitants and Residents of Windsor, Harteford and Wethersfield are now cohabiting and dwelling in and uppon the River of Conectecotte and the Lands thereunto adjoyneing; And well knowing hwere a people are gathered togather the word of God requires that to mayntayne the peace and union of such a people there should be an orderly and decent Government established according to God, to order and dispose of the affayres of the people at all seasons as occation shall require; doe therefore assotiate and conjoyne our seves to be as one Publike State or Commonwelth.” The colony of Connecticut was devoted to “mayntayne and preserve the liberty and purity of the gospell of our Lord Jesus.” As a Bible commonwealth, the colony of Connecticut exercised strict control over the habits, customs, and morals of its inhabitants. Strictures came from the pulpit, and other times from the Assembly. No matter of behavior, whether religious or economic, escaped the watchful eye and admonishing hand of the colonial leaders. In 1640, for example, soon after the Fundamental Orders had been agreed upon, the Assembly passed laws to restrict how much farmers charged for produce and how much workmen and craftsmen charged for services. “In callings which require skill and strength,” the law read, such “as carpenters, joyners, plasterers, bricklayers, Shipcarpenters, coopers and the like, master workmen are not to take above 2s. 6d. a day in summer, in which men may worke 12 howers, but less than 10 howers diligently improved in worke cannot nor may be admitted for a full dayes worke.” The reasoning behind such wage restrictions was summed up in a New Haven law from 1656, that it is “much sin against God, and much damage to men” for a worker to take “excessive wages for work” or for a seller to charge “unreasonable prises for commodities.” The early Bible commonwealth of Connecticut found itself surrounded by enemies, not merely the Dutch but Native American tribes as well. The Pequot War of the 1630s was a brief yet violent contest. In 1637, Captain John Mason and Captain John Underhill led English colonists and allied warriors from the Mohegan and Narraganset tribes to a hastily constructed Pequot fort at the mouth of the Connecticut River; the Pequot were largely destroyed, hundreds of men, women, and children slaughtered by gunfire and a raging fire. William Bradford, the governor and historian of Plymouth Colony, described the final massacre as “a fearfull sight to see them thus frying in the fyer, and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stinck.” Forty years later, Connecticut settlers were again involved in King Philip’s War. During the eighteenth century, Connecticut was engaged in more religious and political conflicts than Indian wars. The Puritan commonwealth was deeply affected by the Great Awakening, which spread through New England during the 1730s and 1740s. The Awakening was a religious revival aimed at jump-starting a declining Puritan sense of God’s “errand into the wilderness” that had motivated and inspired the first generation of Puritans in America. Many Connecticut parishes found the authority of the pastor trumped by itinerant preachers who proclaimed sin and repentance and who in their emotional and caustic sermons divided rather than united the people. Such was the experience of the parishioners at North Stonington, who saw their parish divided between loyalty to the established minister Reverend Joseph Fish and the itinerant firebrand preacher Reverend James Davenport. The Great Awakening led to a division among the faithful in Connecticut into two camps of believers: the New Lights welcomed emotion and change in parishes as they sought to do God’s will; the Old Lights eschewed emotion and change for reason and a clear sense of duty. The conflict between the New Lights and Old Lights would continue until the American Revolution. Connecticut fully experienced the triumphs and trials of the American War for Independence. The former included the triumph at Ticonderoga in May 1775, at which the Connecticut militia, under Colonel Ethan Allen and Captain Edward Mott, was involved. Colonel Benedict Arnold, a native of Norwich, Connecticut, commissioned by Massachusetts to take command at Ticonderoga, resolved to share command with Colonel Allen, whom Arnold described in exasperation as one “Entirely Unacquainted with Military Service.” Colonel Arnold based his authority in part on his role in responding to the British attack on Lexington and Concord in April, to which Arnold, a New Haven apothecary, marched with troops he had raised to the relief of the Massachusetts towns. A year later he struggled through the Maine wilderness to get to and attack Quebec. Arnold was, of course, at first an American hero though subsequently a villain, as he turned to the British side in 1780, conspiring to put the strategic West Point on the Hudson River into the hands of the British. The British commissioned Arnold a general, and it was Brigadier General Benedict Arnold of His Majesty’s troops that attacked New London on the Thames River in 1781. New London was defended by two forts, Fort Griswold on the eastern and Fort Trumbull on the western shores. Many of the Connecticut troops under Colonel William Ledyard (including Ledyard himself) were bayoneted upon surrendering. The British fired upon the town as well. Ire at the wayward native son Arnold later translated itself into a story saying that Arnold watched with satisfaction from the belfry of a local church as the town burned. Notwithstanding the tragedy of war, Connecticut still participated in the War of 1812 and the Civil War. The former war, considered a Democrat-Republican war (“Mr. Madison’s War”) by the citizens of Connecticut, was not enthusiastically supported. Connecticut Federalists believed in trade rather than war with Britain; patriotism alone inspired the 1,800 men who fought. More enthusiastic was Connecticut’s response to the attack on Fort Sumter in April 1861. Believing in the indivisibility of the Union and the wrongness of slavery, Connecticut supplied money, weapons and ammunition, and soldiers to the successful northern war effort. Over 50,000 Connecticut men fought for the Union during the Civil War. Connecticut munitions factories helped to supply the Army of the Potomac. Connecticut, by the time of the Civil War and thereafter, became an industrial leader in America. Railroad tracks criss-crossed the state. Immigrants arrived from Europe in the mid to late nineteenth century seeking work in factories. Urban areas — Hartford, New Haven, Bridgeport, Danbury, Waterbury, and New London — sprung up along the seacoast and inland along rivers. Connecticut slowly lost its rural heritage to an urban, industrial character. Conservative, Republican politics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries gave way under the force of demographic, economic, and social change. As the conservative image of the state slowly changed, the rights of labor and minorities increasingly shaped the politics of the mid-twentieth century. Farming became less important than manufacturing and service industries. Increasingly during the late twentieth into the twenty-first centuries, Connecticut has relied on insurance, high-tech, and tourist industries as foundations for the state economy. Examples include Travelers Insurance, located at Hartford since the 1860s; Sikorsky at Stratford, making helicopters since the 1930s; and the Mystic Seaport, “the Museum of America and the Sea,” a maritime museum and community bringing hundreds of thousands of tourists to Connecticut every year.