Boston 1775

Watching the recent American Revolution documentary series by Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, and David Schmidt, my ear snagged on a detail abou...

Ebenezer Richardson reportedly went into hiding in Philadephia in mid-October 1773, just as the tea crisis heated up. For the next sever...

I wish I could find more sources on Capt. John Malcom ’s years in Québec. Select Documents in Canadian Economic History, 1497–1783 , compi...

In the published Boston town records are some lists of people arriving in Boston by ship in the 1760s. Each set of entries starts by iden...

Despite setbacks like being held prisoner by the French Navy in 1764 , Capt. John Malcom appears to have prospered in Québec in the mid-1...

The Turks and Caicos Islands lie north of Hispaniola. In the eighteenth century, they were sparsely inhabited, used mostly for harvesting sa...

John Malcom spent November 1759 to August 1760 as a prisoner of war in French Canada . He sailed back to Québec at the end of the year, ...

Yesterday’s posting brought John Malcom back to Boston in August 1760 after more than eight months as a prisoner of war in French Canada...

Yesterday we left Capt. John Malcom in mid-1759, plying the route between Boston and the British Empire’s new conquest of Louisbourg, rela...

On 26 July 1758, the French inside Louisbourg surrendered to a besieging British force led by Gen. Jeffery Amherst . John Malcom may have...

In the late 1750s, Britain’s cold war with France once again boiled up into a hot war. That presented dangers for merchant captains like ...

As I wrote yesterday , the brothers John and Daniel Malcom both became mariners in the middle of the eighteenth century. Here are some of...

Back in January I wrote about the mobbing of Customs officer John Malcom on the Sestercentennial anniversary of that event. The stand...

Like pretty much everything else in colonial Boston, the mobbing of John Malcolm had a religious aspect. Malcolm’s parents had migrated...

Another way to look at the mobbing of John Malcolm in January 1774 is through the issue of the rule of law . At the end of her account o...

Yesterday I quoted John Malcolm ’s complaint about how some Royal Navy officers had treated him in 1771, cutting buttons off his cloak . ...

The 18 Feb 1771 issue of Edes and Gill ’s Boston Gazette reported that the Customs Commissioners had promoted John Malcolm from the pos...

Another source on the circumstances of the mobbing of John Malcolm was Gov. Thomas Hutchinson , reporting to the Earl of Dartmouth , Secret...

On 25 Jan 1774, the day that a Boston mob attacked John Malcolm , the merchant John Rowe wrote this in his diary: John Malcom having done ...

It’s not that surprising that the two books based on the memories of George Robert Twelves Hewes , A Retrospect of the Boston Tea-Party (18...