Ten Years of Boston 1775

This is the tenth anniversary of the day I launched Boston 1775. I dated a couple of introductory postings earlier than 14 May 2006 so they’d be easy to find, but that first posting was about an article I’d recently published in New England Ancestors. The next highlighted an article from the New Yorker about a widely reproduced portrait of a black sea captain being revealed as a fraud.

And every day since then I’ve posted something—sometimes written the night before, sometimes written weeks in advance, sometimes kindly written by someone else.

According to Google, Boston 1775 has garnered over 3,300,000 page views. The most hit-upon postings, no doubt determined by keywords in their titles and school assignments, are:

• Samuel Adams and Slavery: The Private Man
• Who Said, “Don’t Fire Till You See the Whites of Their Eyes”? (a discussion from 2007 which has been superseded by newer findings and further research)
• “Take one Young fatt puppy”

This blog turned out to provide my bona fides in the field of Revolutionary history since I don’t have a graduate education or institutional affiliation to point to. I’ve just laid out things I find interesting, and it’s gratifying to hear how interesting they are for others.

Boston 1775 opened doors for me. I got invited to speak on a panel about blogging at the Organization of American Historians meeting. I landed a contract to write a historical resource study for the National Park Service. The research behind my new book, The Road to Concord: How Four Stolen Cannon Ignited the Revolutionary War, started years before the blog, but Boston 1775 provides the platform for launching it.

I wasn’t expecting any of that. I just felt, back in 2004 or 2005, that I’d found some nifty stories that weren’t long or substantial enough to be print articles or papers. I thought it might be fun to share them on a website. My multitalented writing friend Greg Fishbone told me that I could achieve approximately what I wanted with PHP software configured to work like a blog.

That spurred me to look into blogging services to make the process easier. I realized that it would be easier to adapt to available templates than to ask Greg to engineer exactly what I pictured from scratch. I also realized that presenting material in blog form brought two advantages: I could add pages myself without having to work through a webmaster, and I wouldn’t have to launch a full site since no one expects a blog to be complete.

But still I didn’t do anything for months. Then in May 2006 I attended a conference where another writing friend, Mitali Perkins, told all of us in her workshop to just start blogging—find an area of your expertise and share it with the world. In Mitali’s case, she was writing about young immigrants and their books. She was already on her way to becoming a nationally known author and speaker.

After hearing Mitali, I came home and launched Boston 1775. And here we are, ten years later, looking ahead ten years to the sestercentennial of American independence. I can’t promise this blog will be around to see that anniversary, especially in daily form, but it feels like something to shoot for.