Boston 1775

As I was trying to sort out the accounts of the New York Tea Party , one of my biggest questions was how the New York Whigs got advance w...

Susanna Rowson ’s biographers, from Elias Nason to R. W. G. Vail in the Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society in 1932, state tha...

Susanna Rowson died in 1824, having spent the last half of her life writing and teaching in greater Boston. Her novel Charlotte Temple w...

In 1814 Susanna Rowson had her novel The Fille de Chambre republished in Boston, giving it the new title Rebecca . She added an introduc...

Susanna Rowson was America’s first blockbuster novelist, achieving lasting success with her fourth fiction, Charlotte: a Tale of Truth (17...

As I described here , on 21 Jan 1768 a legislative committee steered by James Otis, Jr. , and Samuel Adams proposed that the Massachusetts ...

A few days back I shared Susanna Rowson ’s paean to George Washington in honor of his birthday in February 1798—an early indication that...

February 1798 was the U.S. of A.’s first February for eight years without George Washington as head of state. As described in recent post...

Back in October I left James Otis, Jr. , “non compos mentis” in 1772, with Boston’s voters finally concluding that he lacked the mental s...

The latest issue of Common-Place includes Jason Shaffer’s article “Unveiling the American Actor” , about the rise of theatrical celebrities...

The Bostonian Society’s online exhibit of “From Baby Caps to Mourning Rings: The Material Culture of Boston’s Eighteenth Century Girls and W...

Carnivalesque , a blog carnival from Denmark, recently took note of Boston 1775's entry on Josiah Quincy, Jr. , and in turn alerted me t...