Boston 1775

In April 1770, as recounted yesterday , the convicted murderers Matthew and Patrick Kennedy escaped hanging through the intervention of th...

As described yesterday , on Christmas Eve in 1769 the brothers Patrick and Matthew Kennedy got drunk and stomped around the neighborhood o...

As I described yesterday , in March 1769 the British writer Horace Walpole asked Thomas Chatterton for more information about the fifteent...

Last week I elaborated on a news story from Britain about the rediscovery of a detail in an eighteenth-century painting that everyone knew ...

What happened in Batheaston didn’t stay in Batheaston. Within three weeks after Christopher Anstey read his ode “Winter Amusements” and ...

Anna Riggs (1741–1781) was the daughter of a London Customs official , granddaughter of a wealthy Irish Privy Councilor. Riggs’s mother w...

This week the B.B.C.’s History Today magazine published an article by Stephanie Howard-Smith titled “The War on Dogs,” apparently boiled d...

I recently enjoyed the History of Parliament’s recounting of the 1776 trial of Elizabeth Chudleigh (1721–1788, shown here) for bigamy. T...

And still speaking of Horace Walpole , Lady Louisa Stuart , daughter of the Earl of Bute , had more to say about him. In 1837, Lady Louisa...

Speaking of Horace Walpole , last week I received a packet of postcards from Strawberry Hill, that gentleman’s British estate, in thanks for...

Here’s a brief return to the series of postings about George III ’s speech to Parliament on 31 Oct 1776 and the Whig opposition’s response...

The last major speech in the House of Commons on 31 Oct 1776 about the American War came from Charles James Fox , an opposition Whig (but ...

After King George III had opened Parliament on 31 Oct 1776 with the speech quoted yesterday , the House of Commons debated how to respond....

In the fall of 1777, the historian Catharine Macaulay and her companion Elizabeth Arnold arrived in Paris. They were supposed to proceed...

A couple of news stories about British art caught my eye recently. In 1727 Sir Robert Walpole , then defining the post of prime minister, ...

While reading about Count Axel von Fersen for yesterday’s posting , I saw some intriguing anecdotes in his Wikipedia entry, quoted from The...

As the year draws to a close, I’m looking back on some of the notable events of 1770 that I didn’t discuss on their Sestercentennial anniver...

Horace Walpole , the son of British prime minister Robert Walpole and at the end of his life the fourth Earl of Orford, died in 1797. A q...

In The Fight with France for North America (1902), Arthur Granville Bradley wrote: The killing of Jumonville raised a great commotion ...

Last month The Nib published Josh Trujillo and Levi Hastings’s comic about Gen. Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben as a gay man. I found it i...