Boston 1775

On 10 Mar 1776, the last royal chief justice of Massachusetts, Peter Oliver , boarded a ship called the Pacific , which usually sailed bet...

Building on my counterfactual of what might have happened if Paul Revere and William Dawes had never brought their warning to Lexington ,...

Essex County is gearing up to commemorate the Sestercentennial of “Leslie’s Retreat,” the frustrated British army expedition on 26 Feb 177...

Yesterday I quoted the proceedings of the Dorchester town meeting as printed in the Massachusetts Spy on 13 Jan 1774. They included: ...

I started this month reviewing the events of early March 1774: the return of the Massachusetts Spy , the death of Lt. Gov. Andrew Oliver (s...

On 21 Feb 1775, Dr. Benjamin Church secretly told Gen. Thomas Gage that “Twelve pieces of Brass Cannon mounted, are at Salem , & lodg...

On Sunday, 26 Feb 1775, Capt. William Brown , Ens. Henry DeBerniere , and their bodyservant were in Worcester . They were all soldiers in ...

Yesterday I quoted a letter that appeared in the Boston Evening Traveler on the day after the centenary of the Boston Tea Party . It des...

Today Salem commemorates “Leslie’s Retreat” on 26 Feb 1775, so I’m highlighting Donna Seger’s Streets of Salem posting about that event....

When I was going to elementary school in Massachusetts, back in the last century, we called the weeklong break in February our “flu vacati...

Five years ago Don Hagist at the Journal of the American Revolution shared another early report on the Boston Tea Party , penned on 17 De...

Elisabeth Meier of the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture just wrote on learning about the art and mystery of the wheelwright...

On Wednesday, 10 May, and twice more at the end of the month, Judy Anderson of Marblehead Architecture Heritage will lead a walking tour ...

On Friday, 28 April, I’m headed back to Salem to talk about “Leslie’s Retreat” and The Road to Concord to the Explorers Lifelong Learnin...

My favorite account of “Leslie’s Retreat” appeared in the first volume of the Proceedings of the Essex Institute in 1856. It consists of ...

On Friday, 7 April, I’ll speak at the Salem Athenaeum about “The Salem Connection: A Crucial Part of Massachusetts’s Secret Drive to Collec...

On Sunday, 26 February, Salem will have a “fun and informal reenactment” of the confrontation between Patriots and redcoats across the t...

After so much reading about the approach of the Revolution in New England, I’m always pleased to find books that give me a new perspective...

Earlier this month the Boston Globe published an essay by the historian Peter Charles Hoffer that it headlined, “Happy Salem Gunpowder D...