Boston 1775

On 25 December 1775, 250 years ago today , the Boston merchant John Rowe began a new volume of his daily diary. The Massachusetts Histor...

On 23 July 1813, John Adams wrote to his son-in-law, William Stephens Smith , then serving in the U.S. House of Representatives. That let...

Boston 1775 observed its first new year back in 2007 by establishing an annual tradition of quoting a newspaper carrier verse. Those vers...

On Friday, 6 Jan 1775, the Boston merchant John Andrews reported: This morning we had quite a novel sight. The Sailors belonging to the...

Sometime between 1745 and 1747, just a few years after the Gentleman’s Magazine published Elizabeth Teft’s poem “On Christmas-Day” ( quot...

In February 1743, the Gentlemen’s Magazine published this religious poem: ON CHRISTMAS-DAY. ASSist me, muse divine ! to sing the morn...

A couple of years ago, Robert Paulett at the George Papers Programme shared a list of what the future George III and his siblings received...

This image gets a lot of circulation this time of year, supposedly illustrating Puritan New England’s laws against celebrating Christmas. Of...

On 24 Dec 1771 twelve-year-old Anna Green Winslow sat down to write a letter to her mother in Halifax . Anna was living with an aunt in B...

This weekend, 1-2 December, the Paul Revere House is hosting “Traditions of the Season,” a series of special events free with admission to...

In December 1775, Moses Brown led a delegation of Quakers from Rhode Island up to the Boston siege lines to bring relief to the suffer...

Lt. Martin Hunter did not have an enjoyable Christmas in 1775. That wasn’t just because he was besieged in Boston with the 52nd Regim...

Longtime Boston 1775 readers know that every year ends and/or begins with some “carrier verses”—the doggerel that newspaper apprentices w...

In the 20 Dec 1773 New-York Gazette , alongside the first reports of the destruction of the tea in Boston harbor , printer Hugh Gaine ran...

Over the next week I’ll highlight some intriguing historical events coming up in the new year. In Marblehead , St. Michael’s Church wil...

As I described yesterday, a number of recent publications have included a list of toys that George Washington supposedly ordered for his ne...

This month HistoryTube shared a heart-warming glimpse of George Washington , the just-retired young colonel of the Virginia forces, as a ...

On Monday, 19 Dec 1774, the British Parliament debated “raising the Supply granted to his Majesty”—i.e., enacting taxes, in this case a lan...

Here are entries from the diary of Manasseh Cutler (1742-1823) in 1765. At the time, this Yale graduate was teaching school in Dedham, star...

One of my favorite Revolutionary War diarists is Col. Jeduthan Baldwin of North Brookfield, Massachusetts. He was an artillery engineer, w...