Boston 1775

In addition to the two protests against the Solemn League and Covenant boycott that I’ve quoted over the past two days , three Boston news...

As I wrote yesterday , the text of the Solemn League and Covenant that towns like Westford and Attleboro approved was not the first ve...

In his 1915 study of the Solemn League and Covenant , Albert Matthews based what he called Form A on a printed broadside preserved in Westfo...

The Boston committee of correspondence’s Solemn League and Covenant went further than previous boycotts by having ordinary people pledge no...

Margaret Draper ’s Boston News-Letter was published on Thursdays, and thus couldn’t report on the marriage of province secretary Thomas Flu...

In investigating the myths and realities of goat mascots in the 23rd Regiment of Foot, or Royal Welch Fusiliers, I’ll start with a fine ins...

On Tuesday, 4 December, I’ll speak at the Loring-Greenough House in Jamaica Plain on the topic of “Boston’s Pre-Revolutionary Newspaper W...

Traditionally Boston 1775 observes the turn of the year with a “carrier verse,” one of the topical poems that newspaper delivery boys and...

For the royal authorities in Boston, the letters that Benjamin Hichborn had carried from Philadelphia were the equivalent of today’s int...

After the Boston printer Thomas Fleet died, his 1759 estate inventory didn’t include his slave Peter , suggesting that that woodcut carve...

In late July 1775, a Continental Congress delegate from Virginia named Benjamin Harrison (shown here, at least according to the federal go...

In the eighteenth century, it was common for the teenagers who worked for newspaper printers to print up “New Year’s verses,” which they app...

I’m going back to the seasonal theme of political invective. After the siege of Boston began, Margaret Draper’s Boston News-Letter was the...