Boston 1775

The official published records of the town of Boston say that on Monday, 3 Apr 1775, the inhabitants held a meeting in Faneuil Hall . Wit...

While researching the Boston lawyer Samuel Swift last month, I came across a series of advertisements he placed in Boston newspapers in 177...

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 analyzed the untenable claim that John Adams told descendants of Samuel Swift how the man had tried to spark an uprising insi...

There are a number of problems with the claims in The Memoirs of Gen. Joseph Gardner Swift (1890), quoted back here , about the last months...

As I quoted yesterday , Ann Swift was convinced that her husband, Samuel Swift , was essentially “murdered” by royal authorities when they ...

Contemporaneous sources about Samuel Swift ’s last months are thin. Swift turned sixty years old on 9 June 1775. His first wife, the forme...

In 1817, Gen. Joseph G. Swift (1783–1865), the U.S. Army’s chief of engineers, accompanied the new President, James Monroe , on a tour of f...

Samuel Swift was a member of colonial Boston’s legal establishment—son of a Milton militia colonel and town representative (gravestone s...

In his letter to Abigail Adams on 17 June 1775, which I started quoting yesterday , John Adams continued: I have never been able to obtain...

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

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

Yesterday I described how Bostonians commemorated the first anniversary of the Boston Massacre in 1771, including Dr. Thomas Young deli...