Boston 1775

The Cambridge Room at the Cambridge Public Library has shared the video recording of last week’s panel discussion on “The First Commander R...

On Tuesday, 2 December, I’ll take part in a panel discussion on “The First Commander Remembered: Washington’s Legacy in Cambridge.” This...

Last month the Bonhams auction house sold this fragment of the Washington Elm , about 3" by 6" across, for $4,864. That was con...

This photograph comes from the Leslie Jones Collection at the Boston Public Library, via Digital Commonwealth . The webpage dates the im...

As I announced yesterday , on 21 January Prof. T. H. Breen will speak at the Cambridge Forum about President George Washington ’s visit to...

On Saturday, 20 December, I’ll sign copies of Colonial Comics: New England, 1620-1750 at the Million Year Picnic comics shop in Harvard S...

On Thursday, 13 November, the Cambridge Historical Society hosts an opening reception for its special exhibit on “The Washington Elm,” f...

Once the Second Continental Congress chose Gen. George Washington as commander-in-chief of the army it was adopting outside of Boston, h...

The Commander Hotel in Cambridge opened in 1927 during the Colonial Revival. Located near the site of the “Washington Elm,” the hotel was ...

Boston 1775 reader Robert C. Mitchell alerted me to this webpage from Harvard University. It says of Wadsworth House, once home of the col...

Last month I posted a series of articles about the Washington Elm on Cambridge common ( starting here ), which tried to trace the growth a...

Cambridge ’s Washington Elm died in 1923 after over two centuries of life, not always in the best of circumstances. The legend of that tre...

Though the Washington Elm beside Cambridge common died in 1923, there are remnants and relics of it everywhere in America. Seedlings from ...

In 1927, the editor of the Chronicles of Oklahoma , Joseph B. Thoburn, editorialized about Samuel F. Batchelder’s recent attempt to tell the...

In 1949 Cambridge added a bronze plaque to the granite monument showing Washington on horseback reviewing ranks of troops . The sculptor wa...

Cambridge ’s Washington Elm was in poor shape even before Charles Martyn voiced doubt about its traditional story in his 1921 biography of...

The twentieth century brought a more skeptical approach to writing history, even the history of one’s own nation (as opposed to someone else...

I interrupt my analysis of the Washington Elm ’s decline and fall to share new information on its rise to fame. Yesterday Cambridge resid...

To return to the Washington Elm , said to be the tree in Cambridge under which Gen. George Washington took command, one of the striking th...

As I quoted back in 2007 , as early as 1846 a story circulated about Gen. George Washington reading aloud the 101st Psalm as he took comman...