By American standards, Connecticut is a very old place. The descendants of many of its original Puritan settlers still live here, and in their names--Hale, Baldwin, Trumbull, Bulkeley--the spirit of Thomas Hooker still seems to cast a shadow. From its beginnings, caution and conservatism have shaped the Connecticut character and have made its nickname, "The Land of Steady Habits," truly descriptive of life here.

Yet not everyone in Connecticut shares either that ancestry or that disposition. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, people of decidedly different backgrounds and...