Boston 1775

Caleb Crain’s 2010 New Yorker article “Tea and Antipathy” quotes an item from the Boston press, and Andrew Roberts’s recent Spectator ess...

Last week I analyzed the accounts of tea burning in Marshfield 250 years ago and concluded that I found no strong evidence for the exa...

Over the two days of 5–6 Nov 1773, the Boston town meeting tried to finish the job an informal committee of businessmen (and rioters ) had ...

On 3 Nov 1773, as I described back in 2019 , Boston saw its first tea -inspired violence . The Sons of Liberty, using a note signed “O.C....

Last week at dinner, the conversation turned to the question of what colonial Boston’s clerks of the market did. This is the kind of the din...

Thomas Hutchinson was born on 9 Sept 1711 to a wealthy Boston merchant. His father valued education so much that he funded the building of...

I started this month reviewing the events of early March 1774: the return of the Massachusetts Spy , the death of Lt. Gov. Andrew Oliver (s...

As evening fell on Monday, 26 Aug 1765, crowds started to gather on the streets of Boston. It was twelve days after the town’s first big...

The political prospects of non-importation veered wildly back and forth in the middle of January 1770. As I’ve been tracing , the month...

When we left the “Body of the Trade” in Faneuil Hall yesterday, Whig leader William Molineux had just threatened to storm out of the mee...

On the morning of 18 Jan 1770, Boston’s Whigs thought that Lt. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson ’s sons, Thomas, Jr., and Elisha , had agreed to put...

On 16 Jan 1770, the Boston Whigs circulated handbills for a new public meeting about non-importation. In Faneuil Hall , no less. The tow...