Boston 1775

On 4 Oct 1792, about two months after giving birth to her tenth child in Boston, Susannah Linzee died. She was thirty-eight years old. T...

As I described yesterday , my suggestion in The Road to Concord that the people of Concord divested the Loyalist -leaning Duncan Ingraha...

As I detailed yesterday , Nathaniel Balch (shown here, courtesy of Balchipedia ) was a hatter. But at heart he was an entertainer, known ...

Yet another complication in interpreting the phrase “King Hancock” in 1775 is John Hancock ’s later political career. In 1780 he became g...

Being a widow with young children didn’t make Mary Lobb unusual in eighteenth-century Boston. Even living apart from her second husband pr...

Last week I mentioned Benjamin Andrews , who helped investigate the Boston Massacre . I can’t resist that opening to share one of Revolution...

The latest issue of the online journal Common-place includes Amanda Bowie Moniz’s article about Mary Wilkes Hayley (c. 1728-1808) and her ...

Having discussed what Boston’s Latin School boys were studying , I now turn to the bigger question: what the larger crowd of Writing School ...

Here’s another vivid extract from the Recollections of Samuel Breck , the Philadelphia businessman who was born in Boston in 1771. In this p...

Here's a seasonal memory from Samuel Breck, born in Boston to a well-to-do merchant during the Revolutionary War; Recollections of Samue...

Looking back on Boston's South Latin School under Master John Lovell, the Rev. Jonathan Homer declared, “Lovell was a tyrant, and his s...

This series of postings, starting with Part 1 , has brought Dr. John Jeffries from his early medical practice in Boston to floating across t...

Samuel Breck was born in Boston in 1771. Later his family moved to Philadelphia, and after his death his memoirs were published there. Tha...