Boston 1775

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

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

On Wednesday, 30 November, the American Philosophical Society will host a panel discussion on the topic “Somerset v. Steuart @ 250: A Virtu...

Josiah Quincy, Jr. ’s mission to London in 1774 was a failure after its first week, and he didn’t know it. Quincy met with the prime minis...

I’ve quoted Josiah Quincy, Jr. ’s descriptions of his meetings in November 1774 with Lord North , the prime minister, and the Earl of Dartmo...

Several seminar series and conferences have put out their calls for papers for the 2022-23 academic year, including: David Center for the Am...

In defending himself against the Crown’s charge of seditious libel in July 1777, the Rev. John Horne wanted to show it was reasonable of hi...

The Rev. John Horne (later John Horne Tooke ) was one of Britain’s political radicals in the 1770s. He started the decade as a minister a...

Yesterday I shared more than a thousand words about the American Revolution from Nikole Hannah-Jones’s opening essay in “The 1619 Project,”...

On 2 June 1780, as I described yesterday , a crowd of over 50,000 people surrounded Parliament while Lord George Gordon presented a petiti...

The engraving above shows Lord George Gordon, youngest son of the Duke of Gordon, delivering a petition to Parliament in 1780. That docum...

On 24 Aug 1767, the British politician Thomas Whately wrote to former boss George Grenville about gossip he’d heard from yet another Mem...

The movie Belle is now in theaters, I’m sharing former Massachusetts governor Thomas Hutchinson ’s impression of Dido Elizabeth Belle , t...

A new British movie set in the eighteenth century will be previewed on Sunday, 4 May, at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Belle was ...