Boston 1775

Before the Revolutionary War, Hopestill Capen regularly advertised British dry goods in Boston newspapers . After his two years in jail o...

In May 1778, the Massachusetts General Court began a new legislative year. On 17 September, Council member John Pitts brought the lower...

We left the Boston merchant Hopestill Capen locked up in the Boston jail in mid-1777. As a Sandemanian , Capen had stayed loyal to the B...

In May 1777 Boston had a series of town meetings concerned chiefly with its military defenses. On 17 May that discussion went further to ...

At the end of 1776, Hopestill Capen was still locked away from his wife Patience . And Capen lost patience in another way. On 30 December...

Yesterday’s post recounted Hopestill Capen ’s plea to be let out of jail, where he was locked up on suspicion of being inimical to the newl...

A month ago , Boston 1775 followed Hopestill Capen (1731–1807) to the Boston jail, suspected of being disloyal to the new U.S. of A . And ...

On 6 Aug 1776, 250 years ago today , authorities in Boston locked merchant Hopestill Capen (1731–1807) in jail for “aiding and abetting th...

On 18 Feb 1777, deputy jailer Joseph Otis wrote down “A List of Prisoners in Boston Goal,” transcribed and published by the Colonial Societ...

I’ve been looking into Pool Spear , the Boston tailor accused of tarring and feathering sailor George Gailer in October 1769. A little ...

Here’s an anecdote from Zachariah Whitman’s 1842 History of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company . As I’ve described before, that o...

The teen-aged Benjamin Thompson was clearly excited to be working in Boston in 1769, not in his home town of Woburn or even the smaller po...

Yesterday I described how as a teenager Benjamin Thompson left his first apprenticeship in Salem at age sixteen and sought work in the Bos...

In 1766, at the age of thirteen, Benjamin Thompson of Woburn was indentured to John Appleton, a Salem merchant. He was a bright and ambit...

Boston selectman Timothy Newell reported two disparate events in his journal entry for 30 Oct 1775: A soldier, one of the Light-horse men w...

Yesterday the Boston Globe ran a story about what happens to the items confiscated at security checkpoints in Logan Airport . Eighty perce...