Boston 1775

On 18 July 1776, 250 years ago today , the Declaration of Independence was officially proclaimed in Massachusetts. People had already hea...

As described in The Road to Concord , Boston’s South Writing School shared a fenced-in yard with the militia train’s newer gunhouse. In ...

Three of the people shot in the Boston Massacre died almost immediately: Crispus Attucks , James Caldwell , and Samuel Gray . The soldier...

As I wrote yesterday , I now lean toward housewright Thomas Crafts, Sr. , being one of the Suffolk County coroners who responded to the Bost...

As recounted yesterday , two documents at the Boston Public Library establish that one of the coroners holding inquiries after the Boston Ma...

The most famous piece of coroners’ paperwork from the Boston Massacre is a verdict from the inquest into the death of Michael Johnson—or Cr...

Yesterday I showed a list of the men appointed as coroners in Suffolk County from 1747 to 1774. And that list made me nervous. For nearly...

We have a reasonably good idea of who eight of Boston’s “Loyall Nine” were: John Avery, Jr. , distiller and merchant Thomas Chase , distill...

In a 19 Dec 1765 letter divulging details about Boston’s latest Stamp Act protest, and earlier ones, Henry Bass wrote of the organizers a...

William Molineux refused to pay the £6 fine the Massachusetts Superior Court imposed on him for refusing jury duty in the fall of 1773. ...

In the Washington Post , Prof. Andrew Wehrman wrote about Massachusetts and Boston’s official response to the threat of smallpox in the sum...

This is how the merchant John Rowe described Boston’s first public protest against the Stamp Act in his diary: A Great Number of peopl...

On 4 Mar 1748 the Massachusetts General Court tackled the question of where to build a new meeting-place in Boston, now that it had consi...

The older boy wounded by Ebenezer Richardson ’s shot on 22 Feb 1770 was nineteen-year-old Samuel Gore . He appears here in his early-17...

I’ve been discussing the story of nineteen-year-old Amos Lincoln at the Boston Tea Party . That wasn’t the end of Lincoln’s participati...

When Amos Lincoln died in 1829, the Columbian Centinel newspaper described him as “one of the intrepid band who consigned the Tea to th...

If there’s not enough evidence to say David Bradlee participated in the Boston Tea Party of 1773, I don’t know what he did between the c...

The merchant captain Samuel Dashwood is one of the more dramatic characters in Revolutionary Boston, with a name out of an eighteenth-cent...