Boston 1775

Earlier in the month I reported on Fara Dabhoiwala’s work on the portrait of Francis Williams based on two news articles. I’ve now read P...

Last month Artnet and the Guardian reported on historian Fara Dabhoiwala’s findings about a painting I discussed in 2009 . The painting ...

The Linda Hall Library in Kansas City is featuring a small but mighty display of publications titled “Promoting Useful Knowledge: The Ameri...

I looked up the Massachusetts newspaper coverage of Europe’s unusual atmosphere in 1783, quoted yesterday , after reading Katrin Kleemann’s ...

I heartily recommend reading this webpage from Carpe Librum books , written to sell a rare book of poems printed in London in 1773. Settin...

Boston’s first tea crisis lasted two months. The town heard about East India Company tea coming to certain merchants by 18 October, when t...

In the 1730s Benjamin Franklin printed John Jerman’s American Almanack several times even as he was establishing his own Poor Richard’s ...

On 13 Feb 1770, Josiah Flagg gave a concert in Boston. According to his newspaper advertisements, Flagg had a house near the Old North Me...

On 27 Aug 1775, John Adams visited the College of New Jersey in Princeton . He arrived in town about noon, checking into Jacob Hyer’s tav...

While exploring the fictionalized account of the early military career of Jacob Frost , I mentioned his younger brother, Dr. Joshua Frost . ...

Eventually, Joseph Pope ’s orrery went to Harvard College . I’ll tell that story in more detail sometime, but today I’m highlighting how t...

Yesterday we left watchmaker Joseph Pope burned out of his home and workshop on the west side of Orange Street in April 1787. The Massa...

All the talk in the 1770s about David Rittenhouse ’s orreries and the honor they brought to America might have inspired a young Boston wa...

Silas Deane was the first American diplomat in Paris during the Revolutionary War, trying to win support for the Continental Congress f...

On 5 May 1768, the Pennsylvania Gazette ran an article headlined, “A Description of a new ORRERY, planned, and now nearly finished, by Mr...

On Wednesday, 22 March, I’ll be part of a panel discussion with comics creators E. J. Barnes and Jesse Lonergan at the Royall House and ...

In the summer or autumn of 1806, Susan Bulfinch of Boston wrote a letter to her brother Thomas Aphthorp in Britain with news of a recent f...

I rather like my segue yesterday from the Stamp Act confrontation unfolding 250 years ago to Harvard ’s new Colonial North American Proj...

Yesterday I quoted a horoscope for John Hancock signed by Roger Rintoul of London in 1760. It surfaced in 1904 and was published several y...

In 1904 The Literary Collector announced that a dealer called Libbie & Company was selling the autograph collection of Prof. Vincenzo...