Boston 1775

On 27 Apr 1782, Elizabeth Hill died, “greatly lamented by her Family and Neighbours,” the New-York Gazette reported two days later. In t...

In the year after the Boston Massacre , Benjamin Burdick became the proprietor of the Freemason’s Arms tavern—better known as the Green Dra...

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

It used to be that when two historical organizations scheduled talks on the same night you had to choose between them. Now, thanks to live...

Thomas Newell ’s diary makes clear that he opposed Parliament ’s tea tax in 1773, as most Bostonians did. On 2 December, for instance, he wr...

The Cochran family came to New England from northern Ireland. They settled in towns named to attract such migrants: Belfast in what would be...

I’ve been working through my thoughts on a page from the 8 May 1770 Nova Scotia Chronicle , lampooning the Boston Whigs in much the same way...

When Sen. George Frisbie Hoar sent the Worcester Society of Antiquity’s skull of a British soldier to friends in his home town of Concord ...

As I discussed yesterday , despite how Josiah Quincy characterized the situation in his biography of Samuel Shaw , the Shaw family was not ...

On 23 Feb 1830, the Rhode-Island American reported this death: In Waldoborough, (Me) Mr William Hendley, formerly of Roxbury , Mass. aged 8...

On Saturday, 16 December, I’ll be one of the speakers at the Grand Lodge of Masons in Massachusetts’s “Boston Tea Party 250th Symposium.” ...

While researching the Boston lawyer Samuel Swift last month, I came across a series of advertisements he placed in Boston newspapers in 177...

Yesterday I analyzed the untenable claim that John Adams told descendants of Samuel Swift how the man had tried to spark an uprising insi...

As I quoted yesterday , Ann Swift was convinced that her husband, Samuel Swift , was essentially “murdered” by royal authorities when they ...

Two of the things that merchant John Rowe valued most were Freemasonry and funerals . He was a high-ranking member of the St. John’s Lod...

Over the past three days I’ve discussed seven purported samples of tea from the Boston Tea Party . And we’re not done yet! The Old So...

This week Boston’s historical institutions are offering two presentations about notable African-Americans in Revolutionary Massachusetts. ...

At the website of the Danvers Archival Center, part of the town’s public library , Richard B. Trask shared his essay “Discovering Paul Reve...

I’ve been discussing the story of nineteen-year-old Amos Lincoln at the Boston Tea Party . That wasn’t the end of Lincoln’s participati...

When Amos Lincoln died in 1829, the Columbian Centinel newspaper described him as “one of the intrepid band who consigned the Tea to th...