Boston 1775

Back in April , I started to look into the men Owen Richards sued for tarring and feathering him on 18 May 1770. The first and easiest to...

Yesterday I quoted a long anecdote that John Adams wrote out in 1789 about a discussion between two Massachusetts politicians seventeen ye...

On 8 Feb 1789, John Adams wrote to Dr. Benjamin Rush about the creation of Pennsylvania’s wartime constitution, which was too simple and r...

For acting governor Thomas Hutchinson , the dispute between his Council and the provincial secretary Andrew Oliver was yet one more head...

On 12 Oct 1770, eight members of the Massachusetts Council delivered their depositions about what had happened on 6 March, the day after th...

Yesterday we left off as provincial secretary Andrew Oliver ’s sworn statement about what members of the Massachusetts Council had said o...

Here’s another controversy from 1770 that I didn’t note on the exact 250th anniversaries of its notable dates since I had other topics at h...

Your Most Obedient & Humble Servant is a new podcast hosted by Kathryn Gehred, one of the editors working on the forthcoming scholarly...

Back in late March 1770, the Boston town meeting had commissioned Capt. Andrew Gardner to carry its official report on the Boston Massa...

After the shooting on King Street on 5 Mar 1770, townspeople raced to take the wounded to doctors and to demand justice. British army ...

When Gov. Francis Bernard finally convinced his Council to agree to let the army use the Manufactory building as barracks, he knew tha...

Speaking of William Dunlap ’s tragedy André , my friend John W. Kennedy has created an online text of that play by transcribing the 1798 e...

Reading about Harvey Amani Whitfield’s new book on slavery lingering in Vermont even after being banned in the new republic’s 1777 consti...

Last month the Boston Globe reported on the opening of a vault in the Massachusetts State House. Officials found nothing earth-shaking i...

Who was the Braintree man that Abigail Adams called “Tertias Bass” in 1776? I was ready to give up that quest when I came across a letter ...

This week the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge published an anthology of comics called  Minimum Paige . The first item is a little horror s...

In 1760, Boston’s four representatives to the lower house of the Massachusetts General Court were John Phillips, Royall Tyler (father of t...

Check out Caitlin G. D. Hopkins’s examination at Vast Public Indifference of this historic plaque near her home in the Watson’s Corner neig...

Late in life, Boston native Royall Tyler (1757-1826) tried rewriting his bestselling novel, The Algerine Captive , with new material, hopi...