Boston 1775

Just above its report on the Royal Navy store ship that caught fire in Boston harbor on 29 May 1773 ( quoted yesterday ), Richard Draper ’s...

Like pretty much everything else in colonial Boston, the mobbing of John Malcolm had a religious aspect. Malcolm’s parents had migrated...

Last month Prof. Carl Robert Keyes’s Advertisements 250 project highlighted a couple of notices that appeared one on top of the other in th...

On 11 Oct 1773, 250 years ago today, Jacob Bates ran his last advertisement in the Boston newspapers. It appeared in the Boston Post-Boy ...

On Monday, 19 Sept 1774, the Fleet brothers’ Boston Evening-Post reprinted the article from the New-York Gazetteer that I’ve been discuss...

The newspaper item I quoted yesterday , listing fifteen Whigs as Boston’s chief troublemakers and adding the surnames of three printers in ...

September 1774 was a very busy time around Boston. On the first day of the month, Gen. Thomas Gage ’s troops seized gunpowder from Middles...

In January 1773, the town meeting of Sheffield named a large committee “to take into consideration the grievances which Americans in gener...

In the same 14 Dec 1772 issue of the Fleet brothers ’ Boston Evening-Post that I mentioned yesterday , just above the rumors about Rhode Is...

This week I watched an online talk by Robert Darnton about his new book Pirating and Publishing: The Book Trade in the Age of Enlightenment ...

Now to get back to events in Marlborough in July 1770. Back here I quoted a letter published in the Boston Gazette on 30 July 1770, d...

On 26 Mar 1770, the Boston Gazette ran this advertisment: To be Sold by EDES and GILL (Price Eight Pence Lawful Money) A PRINT contai...

As I wrote yesterday , on 1 Apr 1765 the Boston Evening-Post ran a front-page article about vampires cribbed from an account of traveling i...

The March 1732 issue of The Gentleman’s Magazine in London carried this news in its Foreign Advices section: “From Medreyga in Hungary, T...

The fight at the Clarke house on School Street on the night of 17 Nov 1773 offers a good test case of colonial Boston’s highly politicized...

Last week I mentioned in passing the marriage of Gershom Spear (1755-1816) to Elizabeth Bradlee. The bridegroom almost didn’t make it. On...

Given Boston’s religious heritage, the Great Fire of 1760 naturally caused people to ask what God meant by it. On 23 March, the Sunda...

The scope of the Boston fire of 20 Mar 1760 really comes out in the list of victims that the newspapers published in the following week. ...