J. L. BELL is a Massachusetts writer who specializes in (among other things) the start of the American Revolution in and around Boston. He is particularly interested in the experiences of children in 1765-75. He has published scholarly papers and popular articles for both children and adults. He was consultant for an episode of History Detectives, and contributed to a display at Minute Man National Historic Park.
J. L. Bell will be one of the panelists in the discussion of “A Knock at the Door: Three Centuries of Governmental Search and Seizure” at the Old State House in Boston on 4 November. How does James Otis, Jr.’s argument against the London government’s writs of assistance connect to the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, and what is the status of that protection today?
Hear J. L. Bell “Gossiping About the Gores” at Old South Meeting House, archived by the WBGH Forum Network. (And follow along with the handout.) This talk, delivered in January 2009, follows one Boston family from the 1760s through the 1820s. Striving in society, divided by politics, and occasionally star-crossed by love, the Gores provide a lively view of life during the American Revolution.
Hear J. L. Bell discuss John Adams with Mike Pesca, host of N.P.R.’s The Bryant Park Project, in April 2008.
Check out the online exhibit about the 5th of November in Boston that J. L. Bell assembled for the Bostonian Society. People in Britain celebrated that date as Guy Fawkes’ Day, but in Boston it was “Pope-Night”—a literal riot of bigotry, violence, and giant puppets of the Pope!
J. L. Bell’s article “A Bankruptcy in Boston, 1765” appears in the fourth-quarter 2008 issue of Massachusetts Banker. You can download a copy of the entire magazine for free from this page.
J. L. Bell’s article “‘I Never Used to Go Out with a Weapon’: Law Enforcement on the Streets of Prerevolutionary Boston,” about town watchmen, British army officers, and the Boston Massacre, is available in the Dublin Seminar volume Life on the Streets and Commons.
Children in Colonial America, edited by Prof. James Marten and published by N.Y.U. Press, features J. L. Bell’s chapter “From Saucy Boys to Sons of Liberty: Politicizing Youth in Pre-Revolutionary Boston.”

Friday, June 05, 2009

Reconsidering the Massachusetts Regulators

The kind folks at M.I.T. Press Journals alerted me to material on their website related to Robert A. Gross’s article “A Yankee Rebellion?: The Regulators, New England, and the New Nation,” from the March 2009 issue of the New England Quarterly.

From this page one can download:

  • a PDF file of the article itself.
  • a podcast conversation between Bob Gross and William M. Fowler, chair of the N.E.Q.’s board. (I couldn’t download the MP3 file with Firefox, but could with Safari.)
The abstract for the article says:
Was Shays’s Rebellion a sign of a general crisis of self-government in the new nation, or was it a peculiarly Yankee affair? This essay suggests that wrenching changes, growing out of the Revolution in Massachusetts, turned a conflict over taxes common to all the states into a unique and short-lived political upheaval.
As the article’s subtitle shows, historians seem to be paying more attention to how the western Massachusetts farmers called themselves “Regulators,” tying their movement into the pre-Revolutionary uprising in western North Carolina. They also saw themselves as continuing the Revolutionary struggle itself; they had first closed their county courts in 1774 to protest the Massachusetts Government Act. Their opponents, including the Boston financial elite and the Federalists who responded with a new Constitution, had reasons to portray the “Shaysites” as isolated debtors, outside the American mainstream.

Bob Gross is the author of The Minutemen and Their World, a now-classic study of Concord society in the decades leading up to the shooting there on 19 Apr 1775. Bill Fowler is the author of several books on the Revolutionary period, including a short biography of Samuel Adams that I blame for getting me interested in this field.

[Thanks to the Boston 1775 readers who alerted me to the technical problems in today’s entry while I was out.]

PERMANENT LINK: 09:04

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