Boston 1775

Yesterday we left William Jackson on the road from Portsmouth, New Hampshire , to Boston, having reached the town of Newburyport on 11 Apr...

When I started to look at the Continental capture of the brig Elizabeth in early April 1776, I didn’t expect to find so much drama and mys...

Whenever I recount a story at length, I like to add some new sources, connections, or interpretations. I don’t want to just repeat what othe...

According to the New-York Journal article I quoted yesterday , on 10 July 1776 Basile Boudrot was sent from New York to Newburyport to s...

Back here I described the family of the Rev. Jonathan Parsons of Newburyport , including his fourth son, Thomas Parsons , who disappeared...

In the April 1776 letter from Capt. Hector McNeill to Col. Benedict Arnold (shown here) that I quoted yesterday is the line, “My William F...

There are a lot of unanswered questions about the disappearance of Capt. Thomas Parsons , his ship , and his crew in early 1772. As colon...

Alas, the first newspaper printed in Newburyport , Massachusetts, Henry-Walter Tinges ’s Essex Journal and Merrimack Packet , wasn’t founde...

Jonathan Parsons was born in West Springfield in 1705, the son of a church deacon. As an adolescent he “worked at a trade,” but a Yale tu...

Along with the other reports on life inside besieged Boston that I discussed yesterday , on 17 Dec 1775 Capt. Richard Dodge reported this ...

Capt. Richard Dodge was a Continental Army officer stationed in Chelsea during the second half of 1775. Like his regimental commander, Lt....

The Rev. Edward Bass of Newburyport was under pressure from both sides during the Revolutionary War. As a minister in the Church of Eng...

New England’s Puritan heritage made those colonies less than welcoming for the Church of England. There was an Anglican missionary organiz...

On 10 Aug 1775, the Newburyport schoolmaster John Vinal wrote out the text of a new advertisement to appear in the next day’s Essex Journ...

Isaiah Thomas and Henry-Walter Tinges launched the Essex Journal newspaper in Newburyport in 1773. Among its advertisers was town scho...

In January 1764 the Massachusetts General Court passed a law allowing part of the town of Newbury to split off as the new town of Newbury...

This weekend the town of Newburyport will commemorate the 250th anniversary of when Col. Benedict Arnold and his Continental volunteers ...

Among the presentations at this Saturday’s commemoration of Gen. George Washington ’s arrival in Cambridge is a talk by Longfellow House a...

On 6 Apr 1775, James Warren was in Concord , representing Plymouth in the Massachusetts Provincial Congress . He started writing home to...

Aside from having several children , what did Sylvanus Lowell do after being so badly injured at the Marblehead smallpox hospital in 17...