Boston 1775

In April, I went to Philadelphia to help lead the Pursuit of History Weekend on “The Road to Independence,” nearly three full days of explo...

It’s possible to follow cancer specialist John Pope ’s travels during the Revolutionary War through his advertisements in newspapers. Ther...

Yesterday we left Mary Forbes , wife of the Rev. Eli Forbes of Gloucester , being treated in Boston by the cancer specialist John Pope fo...

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...

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

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 ...

To celebrate the publication of the first volumes of The Complete Writings and Selected Correspondence of John Dickinson, the American Phil...

In 1726, Mary Toft claimed to have given birth to rabbits. This generated a lot of news coverage and debate in Britain. The episode contin...

Benjamin Lay (1682-1759) was one of the most unusual people in Britain’s early eighteenth-century American colonies. Lay was only a littl...

Earlier this month Robynne Rogers Healey’s review of Esther Sahle’s Quakers in the British Atlantic World, c. 1660-1800 appeared on H-Net....

The natural-rights argument of the Revolutionary War inspired the New England states to end slavery or at least start phasing it out. H...

Gary B. Nash, a leading historian of the early America, died late last month just after turning eighty-eight years old. This is from Carl...

Maureen Taylor, author of the Last Muster collections of photographs of people who lived through the Revolutionary War, recently posted v...

On 21 July 1769, Eunice Paine wrote to her brother, Robert Treat Paine , about a preacher she had just seen at Boston’s Faneuil Hall . T...

On 29 January 1776, Gen. Nathanael Greene wrote to his brother Christopher from the Continental camp on Prospect Hill about a family crisi...

In December 1775, Moses Brown led a delegation of Quakers from Rhode Island up to the Boston siege lines to bring relief to the suffer...

Next year’s Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife will take place on 22-24 June 2018 at Historic Deerfield . The subject will be “Relig...

Next week I’ll be one of the presenters at a teachers’ workshop organized by Minute Man National Historical Park . My topic will be the Ma...

At the Early American Ceramics site , Justin W. Thomas just wrote about what he found at a site in Peabody, which in the eighteenth centur...