Boston 1775

On 23 July 1813, John Adams wrote to his son-in-law, William Stephens Smith , then serving in the U.S. House of Representatives. That let...

Yesterday’s précis of the life of Charlotte Biggs promised a connection to pre-Revolutionary Boston. You remember that young man whom Ch...

Toward the end of their 8 May 1770 town meeting , Bostonians turned to approving salaries for the town’s schoolteachers. There were five...

As quoted yesterday, in the summer of 1775 London newspapers reported that letters found on the body of Dr. Joseph Warren after the Battl...

On Wednesday, 1 November, I’ll speak at the Old North Church on “Classes and Forms: The Landscape of Colonial Boston’s Public Schools.” ...

Yesterday I described the 1761 collection of poems titled Pietas et Gratulatio , designed to show off the learning of Harvard College in pr...

This is Thomas Hutchinson writing in the third person about himself as a young man: When he left College [1727] he went into his fathe...

In the summer of 1775, a letter from a British army officer in Boston circulated widely in London. Dated 5 July 1775 and stripped of a sig...

Last month Prof. Chris McDonough of the University of the South queried me about how Master John Lovell (shown here) of Boston’s South Lati...

When Capt. James Smithwick was lost at sea in early 1778, as I recounted last week , he left in Boston a widow named Mary and at least thre...

So here’s the scoop on James “Jemmy” Lovell (1737-1814) and “the CONJUGATION copulative .” When he graduated from Harvard College in 1756...

Yesterday I quoted Harrison Gray Otis on his first day at the South Latin School in Boston. Today I quote his memory of his last day under...

Master John Lovell (shown here, in an image from the 1886 Catalogue of the Boston Public Latin School ) didn’t let just any child into Bost...

I’ve decided it’s “Back to School Week” at Boston 1775 . Every posting (well, ’most every posting) for the next few days will be about schoo...

Yesterday I linked to some portraits of Boston merchants without their wigs . In those paintings they wore their banyans (dressing-gowns) an...

Looking back on Boston's South Latin School under Master John Lovell, the Rev. Jonathan Homer declared, “Lovell was a tyrant, and his s...

With corporal punishment in schools on the front page of today's New York Times , it seems timely to share more of Harrison Gray Otis...