Boston 1775

In May 1778, the Massachusetts General Court began a new legislative year. On 17 September, Council member John Pitts brought the lower...

We left the Boston merchant Hopestill Capen locked up in the Boston jail in mid-1777. As a Sandemanian , Capen had stayed loyal to the B...

At the end of 1776, Hopestill Capen was still locked away from his wife Patience . And Capen lost patience in another way. On 30 December...

A month ago , Boston 1775 followed Hopestill Capen (1731–1807) to the Boston jail, suspected of being disloyal to the new U.S. of A . And ...

During the siege of Boston , Benjamin Davis, Sr. , signed up for the Loyal American Association, which appears to have been a pro-Crown mili...

As I wrote back here , the lore in Benjamin Davis ’s family was that his third wife, Alice , left him soon after their marriage in 1768 beca...

Hopestill Capen wasn’t the only Sandemanian clapped into the Boston jail in the summer of 1776, as discussed yesterday . Another merchan...

On 6 Aug 1776, 250 years ago today , authorities in Boston locked merchant Hopestill Capen (1731–1807) in jail for “aiding and abetting th...

As I reported yesterday , in February 1769 the printer Ezekiel Russell advertised the publication of Pvt. William Clarke ’s play The Mis...

This is the Sestercentennial, or 250th anniversary, of the first issue of the Boston Chronicle . For a decade Boston had been a four-new...

I’ve shared reminiscences from Benjamin Russell and Harrison Gray Otis of how their Boston public schools closed in April 1775 with the...

Here’s an anecdote from Zachariah Whitman’s 1842 History of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company . As I’ve described before, that o...

After last week’s postings on Boston’s Sandemanian congregation and the theological debate they inspired, a longtime Boston 1775 reader a...

In the spring of 1768, a pamphlet was published in Boston with the title A Modest Account concerning the Salutations and Kissings in ancient...

In 1728, a Presbyterian minister named John Glas was asked to leave his pulpit in Tealing, Scotland, because he had published some unorthodo...

People outside New England noticed the Boston Gazette ’s criticism of “two or three weak and imbittered Persons, of the most insignificant ...

Not everyone in Boston observed the Thanksgiving holiday on 15 Dec 1774, as the Massachusetts Provincial Congress had asked people to do . ...