It's been quite a year for us here at The Hartford Courant, celebrating our 250th year of continuous publication. The newsroom spent 2014 reporting hundreds of stories from our collective past, mining our archives and those of others to create an illustrated chronicle of news spanning 250 years...
It was during a run of particularly good luck for law enforcement but bad luck for the political class that the FBI issued an assessment of the local political landscape that has lost none of its bite. "If things keep going the way they have been in Connecticut," deputy FBI director Chris Swecker...
Confronted with tragedy, we reach for objects that might steady us, tangible reminders of a loved one we've lost, the consoling beauty of a flower or an angel's face, an old shirt with a familiar scent, a stuffed bear's soft and fuzzy comfort. We seek solace, and also apartness, in quiet, methodical...
A 1948 chamber of commerce booklet with a plain brown cover and a simple title, "New Britain, An Industrial City," paints a remarkable story. In that postwar year, even after some shaking out, there were still nine great hardware companies operating inside the city limits, employing at least 15,000...
In 1939, the teenaged H. Joseph Gerber was a laborer in a Nazi concentration camp. Less than a decade later, Gerber was a college graduate, inventor of the most revolutionary engineering tool since the slide rule and owner of a fledgling company. He went on to earn more than 600 patents and build...
HARTFORD – Longtime Hartford resident Hiram Percy Maxim was a true renaissance man. Maxim's many interests and accomplishments are dizzying, from pioneering early automobiles, to inventing gun and industrial silencers, to founding the world's largest amateur radio organization. In between, Maxim...
There's no tidy way to summarize the state of innovation and invention in Connecticut, as enterprises have grown from numerous directions, each with its own tradition. It's safe to say that big corporations such as United Technologies, Pfizer and the insurance companies drive technology in Connecticut,...
The software and Internet explosion in Silicon Valley was still years away when Sukhminder Grewal worked there as a nuclear engineer for General Electric in the '80s. But when Yale School of Medicine recruited Grewal's wife, a post-doctoral immunologist then at Stanford, the young couple headed...
When first lady Mamie Eisenhower ceremonially pushed the USS Nautilus into the Thames River in 1954, ushering in the atomic submarine era, the vessel carried 140 types of springs made by one Connecticut company alone. It was no fluke for Barnes Group Inc., then known as Associated Spring Corp....
Frederick Rentschler and Igor Sikorsky, visionaries of aviation, came to Connecticut just a few years apart, each with a new idea that would revolutionize flying — Rentschler's air-cooled, radial airplane engine and Sikorsky's helicopter. Both men, engineers from privileged backgrounds, had fought...
As we gear up for another Patriots Super Bowl appearance, take a look back at some of the team's former players on this #ThrowbackThursday.
A look back at the Academy Award ceremonies through the years.
With the Patriots hosting the Baltimore Ravens in the AFC Divisional Round Saturday afternoon, here's a look back at their more memorable playoff moments.
As part of our 250th celebration, editorial cartoonist Bob Englehart will be posting selected historical cartoons from The Courant's files every Thursday. Henry McNulty, who is our informal historic authority on all things Courant, will provide the explanation for the cartoons.