Boston 1775

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...

The Rev. John Lee Watson was pretty relentless in arguing his claim that John Pulling , not Robert Newman , had hung the lanterns in Old N...

The 14 Oct 1793 Boston Gazette reported this response to Gov. John Hancock ’s unexpected death on the 8th: Tuesday last, agreeably to p...

I received two excellent packages from Westholme Publishing in the past week, and this photo shows me preparing a fine cup of Yorkshire Go...

For the past few days I’ve been quoting an 1835 account written from the perspective of a young British officer captured in Boston harbor i...

Yesterday’s installment from the 1835 United Service Journal article ended with the unnamed, and perhaps fictional or composite, author be...