Boston 1775

Back in July , I discussed how Simeon Potter of Rhode Island had commanded a privateer in 1744 and attacked “Fort d’Oyapoc,” a small Fren...

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...

Here’s one more detail from the merchant John Andrews ’s 22 July 1774 letter about how over a hundred Boston merchants came to sign one of t...

I started looking into what happened in Boston on 5 Nov 1773 because I was curious about who the designated villains of that year were. Di...

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....

I’ve been analyzing the publication of the story from Samuel Swift ’s descendants that he tried to instigate an uprising against British tro...

Yesterday I quoted the portion of the article in Richard Draper ’s Boston News-Letter for 8 Nov 1764 discussing how kids these days were t...

The 8 Nov 1764 Boston News-Letter included this commentary on how the town had come to celebrate the 5th of November: Monday last being the...

For the Washington Post , University of Delaware history professor Zara Anishanslin wrote about the roots of far-right accusations that the ...

The Journal of Religious History recently made Luke Ritter’s article “Pope's Day and the Language of Popery in Eighteenth-Century New En...

A friend alerted me that the Dollop podcast recently cited my name. The Dollop is a conversation about history between two comedians, Dav...

Earlier this fall, Boston 1775 reader David Churchill Barrow asked me what Pope Night was like in Boston in 1770, 250 years ago today. A...

On Thursday, 5 November, I’ll speak via Boston by Foot on the topic “Lost Holiday: How Colonial Boston Celebrated the Fifth of November.” ...

We don’t have inside information on the protests in front of the shops of people who defied Boston’s non-importation agreement in Februar...

On Friday, 6 Jan 1775, the Boston merchant John Andrews reported: This morning we had quite a novel sight. The Sailors belonging to the...

Here’s a final note on the riotous events of 28 Oct 1769—the merchants’ confrontation with printer John Mein and the tarring and featheri...

The Fifth of November was a festival of misrule for eighteenth-century colonial Boston, which locals called “ Pope Night .” But the celeb...

In the early 1770s, Mary Clapham managed the Royal Exchange tavern on King Street, near the center of Boston. In this 1801 view of Stat...

On 5 Nov 1768, 250 years ago today, Boston’s apprentice printers issued this broadside , one of the most elaborate surviving artifacts of...

It’s been nearly twenty years since I started to research Revolutionary Boston intensely. At first my goal was to develop a sense of what it...