Boston 1775

Yesterday I started to tell the story of how Jolley Allen evacuated Boston with the British fleet in March 1776—or tried to. Quoting All...

As related in yesterday’s posting , a storm in September 1767 pushed a schooner packed with whale oil onto Cape Cod . But that ship was...

On Thursday, 1 Oct 1767, the biggest local story in the Boston News-Letter was the weather: The Beginning of last Week we had here very ser...

Prof. Wendy Raphael Roberts of the University of Albany has announced the discovery of a previously unknown poem by Phillis Wheatley , “On t...

Fans of the Age of Sail might enjoy reading Elin Jones’s article “Stratifying Seamanship: Sailors’ Knowledge and the Mechanical Arts in Eigh...

As I discussed yesterday , the British government exempted the island of Nantucket from its Restraining Act, which limited trade with Ameri...

In the early spring of 1775, even before the Battle of Lexington and Concord , Parliament took steps to clamp down on New England and its ...

In early October 1775, Nathaniel Balch the hatter left London and sailed back home to America. On 23 December, the Providence Gazette ...

On the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party I’m sharing one of the more unusual eyewitness accounts of the event. This text was published ...

For the last couple of days I’ve quoted newspaper accounts from October 1738 about a violent uprising of Wampanoag people on Nantucket t...

Yesterday I quoted items from the Boston News-Letter of 5 Oct 1738 and the Boston Evening-Post of 9 Oct 1738 about a narrowly averted upri...

On 5 Oct 1738, the Boston News-Letter published an article describing a planned uprising by Wampanoags on Nantucket Island : We hear f...

Fort Phoenix in Fairhaven overlooks the site of what’s often called, especially in Fairhaven, the first naval fight of the Revolutionary...

Following up on Bunker Hill (discussed in most of these postings ), Nathaniel Philbrick has brought out Valiant Ambition: George Washingt...

In 1763 the London merchant Jonathan Barnard took on Gilbert Harrison (d. 1790, his monument in the church at Newton Purcell shown here) a...

The Boston Massacre occurred 244 years ago today. From the start that was a controversial event with different participants seeing it quite...

I’ve been discussing the Chinese businessman Punqua Wingchong , who arrived in Nantucket in 1807 and left New York the following year u...

Yesterday I noted Dael Norwood’s article about a Chinese businessman named Punqua Wingchong , who got special permission from Thomas Jef...

On Wednesday, 29 August, the African Meeting House on Nantucket will host a talk by Louis Wilson on “Rhode Island’s Black Patriots in the ...