Boston 1775

Richard Brunton (1749–1832) came to America to fight for his king as a grenadier in the 38th Regiment . That lasted until 1779, when he des...

On 17 June 1775, as I quoted yesterday , John Adams complained that five friends from Massachusetts hadn’t sent him any letters with news a...

After the publication of “Paul Revere’s Ride” by Henry W. Longfellow in 1860, there was a lot more attention on the silversmith and his ac...

When the British army put Thomas Kettell and other provincial prisoners from the Battle of Bunker Hill into the Boston jail, one of the...

As quoted yesterday , in 1835 the Revolutionary War veteran Thaddeus Blood told Ralph Waldo Emerson that he doubted the deposition publishe...

We have a couple of glimpses of Lt. Isaac Potter as an involuntary guest of Concord harness-marker Reuben Brown after the start of the ...

Last month I took another look at the crimes and execution of Levi Ames , but I neglected the important topic of what happened to his bo...

Capt. Moses Harvey ’s November 1775 advertisement (which I quoted Wednesday ) pointedly described five men who had deserted from his Conti...

One of the events of this Saturday’s Grotonfest will be the Groton Historical Society ’s unveiling of a Revolutionary-era cannon . The ...

To figure out what sort of fortune-telling Mary “Moll” Pitcher of Lynn did requires getting around the romanticized descriptions and leg...

On Wednesday, 17 June, Deborah M. Child will speak at the New England Historical and Genealogical Society about her new illustrated biogr...

Yesterday I quoted from the account of the Battle of Bunker Hill in an 1852 history of New Ipswich, New Hampshire , focusing on the expe...

I’ve been tracing the Revolutionary experiences of the Rev. Samuel Dana of Groton, from comfortably ensconced minister to reviled Loyalist ...

Despite being voted out of the pulpit and reportedly shot at , the Rev. Samuel Dana never moved out of Groton during the Revolutionary War...

At the top of New England rural society were a town’s wealthy landowners and professionals, its selectmen , its militia officers, and—once ...

By April 1775, as described yesterday , the Patriot majority in Groton and their Loyalist minister, the Rev. Samuel Dana , were at a stale...

In early 1775, the Rev. Samuel Dana (1739-1798) had been the minister in Groton for nearly fourteen years. But in his thinking he was a Loy...

According to Caleb Butler’s 1848 recounting of how Prudence Wright and the women of Pepperell arrested Leonard Whiting in April 1775, t...

On Saturday, 4 Sept 2010, there will be a ceremonial reopening of the covered bridge in Pepperell, Massachusetts. One celebration will be a...

Asa Lawrence (1737-1804) was a provincial army captain from Groton. In the second volume of his Groton Historical Series (1890), the indefa...