Cotton Mather was born in Boston on 12 February 1663, the eldest child of Increase Mather and Maria Cotton Mather, who was the daughter of John Cotton, an elder statesman of the first generation of settlers in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He lived...

Cotton Mather was born in Boston on 12 February 1663, the eldest child of Increase Mather and Maria Cotton Mather, who was the daughter of John Cotton, an elder statesman of the first generation of settlers in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He lived...

Cotton Mather's life was as genetically and environmentally determined as it was for him theologically predestined. The first child of Increase and Maria Cotton Mather, he was born in Boston on 12 February 1663, into a family whose energies and genius...

The Mather library developed through several generations. Richard Mather began the family book collection, part of which descended to Increase, who made it one of seventeenth-century New England's most distinguished libraries. Building on the books...

Cotton Mather (1663-1728), Puritan clergyman, historian, and pioneering student of science, was an indefatigable man of letters. Of the third generation of a New England founding family, he is popularly associated with the Salem witchcraft trials....