Boston 1775

As soon as the siege of Boston ended, the Massachusetts government moved to fortify Noddle’s Island and other spots in Boston harbor. On...

Yesterday I quoted most of the Boston News-Letter ’s 22 Aug 1765 report on the first anti- Stamp Act protest the week before. In 1856 Sa...

As long as I’m discussing nomenclature for Boston’s political groups in the 1760s, I’ll tackle “the Union Club.” America’s first public, ...

We have a reasonably good idea of who eight of Boston’s “Loyall Nine” were: John Avery, Jr. , distiller and merchant Thomas Chase , distill...

In a 19 Dec 1765 letter divulging details about Boston’s latest Stamp Act protest, and earlier ones, Henry Bass wrote of the organizers a...

John Adams finally got his invitation to dinner at Nicholas Boylston ’s mansion in January 1766. Adams’s mother was a Boylston, first cou...

This is how the merchant John Rowe described Boston’s first public protest against the Stamp Act in his diary: A Great Number of peopl...

As recounted yesterday , Capt. Thomas Speakman was killed in the French and Indian War in January 1757. Though I haven’t seen his pro...

The Liberty riot of 10 June 1768 wasn’t just about the seizure of John Hancock ’s sloop for alleged Customs violations. It was also abo...

On the night of Monday, 19 May 1766, with fireworks going off all over Boston Common to celebrate the repeal of the Stamp Act , Whigs hun...

The 19 May 1765 Boston Gazette offered a brief description of the very start of that day’s town-wide observance of the end of the Stamp A...

On Monday, 19 May 1766, all of Boston was gearing up to celebrate the repeal of the Stamp Act at last. The issue of the Boston Gazette ...

News that Parliament had repealed the Stamp Act arrived in Boston on 16 May 1766, as described yesterday. That quickly set off a public ...

The anonymous account of Boston’s 14 Aug 1765 Stamp Act protest I quoted yesterday also includes a passage that’s prompted a lot of quest...

This is the 250th anniversary of Boston’s first public demonstration against the Stamp Act , which set off a wave of similar protests in ...

One for the perennial questions about America’s Revolution is how we should understand the “Sons of Liberty,” as American activists called...

Pope Night is turning out very long this year. Some Boston 1775 readers thought yesterday’s description of the Fifth of November celebrati...