Boston 1775

When we left the Boston selectmen yesterday , a town meeting committee had just told them that they’d heard the widow Rebecca Holbrook mig...

As March 1780 began, the selectmen of Boston were looking for two new schoolmasters and one temporary schoolhouse . Before the war, men ...

On 24 Feb 1780, Boston’s Continental Journal reported: Early on Tuesday morning last [i.e., 22 February], a fire broke out in the South ...

As described in The Road to Concord , Boston’s South Writing School shared a fenced-in yard with the militia train’s newer gunhouse. In ...

A significant portion of The Road to Concord focuses on one spot in Boston: the corner of West Street and Tremont Street. There, across fro...

Back in 2013 I quoted Charles Lee ’s 18 June 1756 letter to his sister on being “adopted by the Mohocks into the Tribe of the bear under th...

In 2012 and again in 2023 I reported on the deterioration of the Jacob Osgood House in Andover . Parts of that building may have dated ...

Three of the people shot in the Boston Massacre died almost immediately: Crispus Attucks , James Caldwell , and Samuel Gray . The soldier...

As I wrote yesterday , I now lean toward housewright Thomas Crafts, Sr. , being one of the Suffolk County coroners who responded to the Bost...

As recounted yesterday , two documents at the Boston Public Library establish that one of the coroners holding inquiries after the Boston Ma...

The most famous piece of coroners’ paperwork from the Boston Massacre is a verdict from the inquest into the death of Michael Johnson—or Cr...

Yesterday I showed a list of the men appointed as coroners in Suffolk County from 1747 to 1774. And that list made me nervous. For nearly...

Early this month I started to discuss the office of coroner in pre-Revolutionary Boston. Then came Pope Night , followed by postings about ...

Slavery North has issued a call for proposals for a scholarly conference to be held at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst , on 8-12 ...