Boston 1775

Yesterday we left Mary Forbes , wife of the Rev. Eli Forbes of Gloucester , being treated in Boston by the cancer specialist John Pope fo...

Here’s another clergyman’s account of how John Pope , a cancer specialist, treated a patient in pre-Revolutionary Boston. These extracts ...

The Rev. Dr. John Prince (1751–1836, shown here) had an unusual path to the pulpit , and an unusual sideline afterward. He was apprentice...

Here’s one more story from my foray up the coast from Boston to Gloucester . Dr. Samuel Plumer , the man who was keeping George Penn ensla...

On 7 Apr 1770, acting governor Thomas Hutchinson sent the Massachusetts General Court documents from Essex County justices of the peace de...

After George Penn sat on the Salem gallows for an hour and was whipped twenty times, as described yesterday, the authorities sent him back...

After his Gloucester neighbors mobbed him a second time, dragging him through town and tarring him in 1770, Jesse Seville stopped suing p...

After the attack on Jesse Saville ’s house on 7 Sept 1768, the Essex County authorities brought charges against eight men for assault, as Jo...

After a Gloucester crowd attacked Samuel Fellows and Jesse Saville in September 1768, both men went to work for His Majesty’s Customs Ser...

As I described yesterday , on 7 Sept 1768 the Gloucester merchant David Plumer directed a mob to a house in the Annisquam village, seekin...

Another event of 1770 that I neglected on its 250th anniversary this year was the mobbing of Jesse Saville. Or rather, the mobbing of Je...

Boston’s patriotic celebration of the king’s birthday on 4 June 1768 papered over a deep political divide. That divide had opened when ...

The Cape Ann Museum in Gloucester is hosting its first major archival exhibition, showcasing notable documents from its collection and th...

On the weekend of 24-26 June, Historic Deerfield will host the annual Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, this year’s topic being “N...

In 1795, two years after the Boston’s first theater opened on Federal Street, it hosted its first play “Written by a Citizen of the Unite...

And speaking of Judith Sargent Murray , her modern editor Bonnie Hurd Smith will speak about that pioneering American feminist this month as...

And here are two more claimants to the honor of having killed Maj. John Pitcairn at the Battle of Bunker Hill . The last two I stumbled ac...

Two hundred thirty-two years ago, Boston selectman Timothy Newell wrote in his diary: This morning two bomb Ketches and several armed vesse...

Alerted by a message from Scott on the New England Revolution ( NEREV ) email list, I went looking for reports on the building of a new ship...