Boston 1775

On 6 July 1774, sixty men from towns in Berkshire County met in Stockbridge as a county convention. On the colony’s western end, that gat...

On 4 Oct 1792, about two months after giving birth to her tenth child in Boston, Susannah Linzee died. She was thirty-eight years old. T...

Over the two days of 5–6 Nov 1773, the Boston town meeting tried to finish the job an informal committee of businessmen (and rioters ) had ...

On 3 Nov 1773, as I described back in 2019 , Boston saw its first tea -inspired violence . The Sons of Liberty, using a note signed “O.C....

There are a number of problems with the claims in The Memoirs of Gen. Joseph Gardner Swift (1890), quoted back here , about the last months...

Samuel Swift was a member of colonial Boston’s legal establishment—son of a Milton militia colonel and town representative (gravestone s...

As quoted yesterday , in July 1798 David Stoddard Greenough offered a “ONE DOLLAR REWARD” for the return of his teen-aged indentured servan...

As I looked for evidence of Elijah Houghton at the Boston Tea Party , I noticed that right before him on the more expansive lists was Elish...

On 27 Nov 1770, 250 years ago today , the second trial for the Boston Massacre got under way. It was supposed to start a week earlier, b...

On 6 Sept 1770, 250 years ago today, the Boston News-Letter carried this news item: A few weeks since the Operation for the Hare-Lip was p...

As evening fell on Monday, 26 Aug 1765, crowds started to gather on the streets of Boston. It was twelve days after the town’s first big...

The publication of Capt. Thomas Preston ’s “Case” in Boston in June 1770 heightened the danger that had prompted the captain to write to ...

As I recounted back here , the Suffolk County grand jury inquiring into the Boston Massacre took a lot of testimony about whether people ...

In September 1728 the Massachusetts General Court promoted local paper manufacturing by granting a ten-year patent to a group of investo...

On Monday I quoted a Connecticut newspaper report of the arrest of “one Thomas Nichols , a Molatto,” in Natick on suspicion of planning...

Yesterday I quoted Lt. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson ’s account of the anti- Stamp demonstration and riot on 14 Aug 1765. The next day, Andrew ...