365 Days of Boston 1775

This is the anniversary of Boston 1775, so I’ve taken a look back at the first month (well, two and a half weeks) of postings.

Some of those entries have stood up to internet time better than others. The New Yorker took down its article about a supposed portrait of an eighteenth-century black sea captain—so I just added a better link from N.P.R.

I still haven’t found an image of the Boston Athenæum’s portrait of John Adams by Mather Brown to link to in “John Adams: the many faces.” But through 13 July it’s no longer confined to an upstairs board room but available to visitors as part of the institution’s “Acquired Tastes” exhibit. Also on display are a Gilbert Stuart portrait of Adams, a Houdon bust of Lafayette, and a battle painting by John Trumbull.

May 2006 also saw the start of some series of postings:

• about Col. Jeduthan Baldwin, a Massachusetts artillery officer who had most of his clothes stolen from his tent.
• about Newton Prince, a free black man in Boston who witnessed the Boston Massacre, lobbied for an end of slavery, and eventually retired in England.
• about the intertwined fates of Customs informer Ebenezer Richardson and young household servant Christopher Seider.

I managed a couple of book reviews that month; I’ve meant to write more but haven’t gotten around to them.

One of my bigger surprises about how this blog has developed is that the individual with the most entries is George Washington. Of course I expected to write about Washington since he was so important and interesting, but he wasn’t a Bostonian and probably spent less than two years total in New England over his lifetime. But you know what Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee would have written about Washington if he’d had better internet access: “first in war, first in peace, and first in the blog topic index.”