Boston 1775

David Hsiung is the Dr. Charles R. and Shirley A. Knox Professor of History at Juniata College in Pennsylvania. For several years he’s bee...

Preserved Clap was born in Hadley , lived in the part of that town which became Amherst , and ultimately died at age eighty up the Connecti...

I lose track of Dr. Preserved Clap after 1776 until 5 Feb 1781, when the Continental Congress referred a petition from him to its board of...

In the spring of 1776, Dr. Preserved Clap was forty-five years old. He had a wife and young children back in Amherst . And in Boston he w...

Dr. Preserved Clap , the man who stepped forward to render Boston’s broken cannon useful again in the spring of 1776, came from a long line...

In his 29 Apr 1776 letter to Samuel Adams , the Rev. Dr. Samuel Cooper described the man who came forward with a solution for cannon with ...

Yesterday I started quoting a 29 Apr 1776 letter from the Rev. Dr. Samuel Cooper to Samuel Adams about Boston’s defenses soon after the B...

On 29 Apr 1776, one week after writing the letter to John Adams that I quoted yesterday , the Rev. Dr. Samuel Cooper wrote to Samuel Adams...

I was preparing to write about a document from the Samuel Adams Papers at the New York Public Library, digitized as “Letter from John Scolla...

Earlier this year the Sandwich Enterprise shared a story by Cearra O’Hern about the identification of an artifact at the Pilgrim Hall Muse...

On Sunday, 17 May, the Partnership of Historic Bostons is offering a walking tour titled “To Vax or Not to Vax: Smallpox in Early Boston.” ...

On Monday, 18 May, the Massachusetts Historical Society will host a panel discussion on the timely topic “Revolutionary Narratives: From Br...

Twenty years ago today, on 14 May 2006, I posted my first item on this blog . That post was a link to an article I’d written for the magaz...

One of the questions asked after yesterday’s talk on young Benjamin Thompson ’s life in America was whether he interacted with any represen...