Boston 1775

Thomas Newell ’s diary makes clear that he opposed Parliament ’s tea tax in 1773, as most Bostonians did. On 2 December, for instance, he wr...

Caleb Crain’s 2010 New Yorker article “Tea and Antipathy” quotes an item from the Boston press, and Andrew Roberts’s recent Spectator ess...

Last week I analyzed the accounts of tea burning in Marshfield 250 years ago and concluded that I found no strong evidence for the exa...

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....

Without the Boston Massacre reenactment looming over my schedule this year, I’ll devote the next few days to the events of early March 1774...

Earlier this month, the Boston Public Library’s Rare Books and Manuscripts department announced that it had finished scanning its entire car...

The Rev. Jonathan Mayhew insisted that, even though his sermon on 25 Aug 1765 decried the Stamp Act , Bostonians couldn’t have taken that ...

Jonathan Sewall ’s attitude toward politics might seem cynical to us. Sewall played the eighteenth-century patronage game, angling for a...

As shown yesterday , the Boston Whigs played down the crowd violence against Richard Clarke and other tea consignees in early November 1...

The fight at the Clarke house on School Street on the night of 17 Nov 1773 offers a good test case of colonial Boston’s highly politicized...

Richard Draper published an issue of the Boston News-Letter on Friday, 26 Nov 1773. That in itself was notable. The News-Letter norma...

As I wrote back here , Jonathan Clarke (1744-1827) happened to be in London when Parliament enacted the Tea Act of 1773. He took advanta...

Richard Clarke and Sons weren’t the only merchants tapped by the East India Company to import tea into Boston in 1773. The others were:...

Richard Clarke (1711-1795, shown here in a detail from a family portrait by his son-in-law John Singleton Copley ) was one of Boston’s le...

Here are a couple of interesting newspaper articles from this week. In a local section of the Boston Globe , Ben Jacques wrote about th...