Boston 1775

I plucked out a couple more documents from the digitized Thomas Gage Papers to see how well the automated handwriting-recognition program T...

I don’t think Boston 1775 would exist without Google Books, which launched the year before I began blogging. Being able to search for phr...

In May 1778, the Massachusetts General Court began a new legislative year. On 17 September, Council member John Pitts brought the lower...

On Wednesday, 30 September, the Massachusetts Historical Society will welcome Ted Widmer for a conversation titled “The Living Declaration...

A comment about yesterday’s quotation from Abigail Adams has prompted me to veer off into some linguistic digging. Referring to Benjamin...

The American Scholar just published Robert A. Gross’s essay “Gratitude Isn’t Everything,” considering the start of the American Revolution...

The discovery of John Dickinson ’s 28 Oct 1775 letter to David Barclay , quoted yesterday , lets us assess his thoughts on John Adams ’s pri...

In 2019 Ric Detwiller published an excellent article at the Journal of the American Revolution about a Frenchman recruited as a provincial...

On 9 July 1776, 250 years ago today , Heinrich Miller ’s Pennsylvanischer Staatsbote newspaper printed the first translation of the Declar...

Two hundred fifty years ago today, the Continental Congress finished polishing the Declaration of Independence and voted to approve the f...

For one last posting on the label “Breed’s Hill,” I’ll share some thoughts on whether that label matters. These days, it’s mostly useful ...

As I quoted yesterday , in July 1775 the Massachusetts Provincial Congress officially deemed the provincial fortification of Breed’s Hil...

After the British army drove provincial troops off the Charlestown peninsula on 17 June 1775, the Massachusetts committee of safety propo...

In his History of the Siege of Boston , Richard Frothingham published a letter about the Battle of Bunker Hill written by Samuel Gray in Ro...

Yesterday I started to dig into a recent social-media post by the City of Boston Archaeology Department about when the term “Breed’s Hill...

On this anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill , I’m taking note of a document the City of Boston Archaeology Department recently highlig...

Yesterday’s posting mentioned the Rev. Samuel Ashbow , a Baptist minister from the Mohegan community in Connecticut . A lot of informati...

Here’s another data point on the phrase “Tarleton’s quarter(s)” in the early American republic. This item that appeared in the Centinel of...

Last week saw the anniversary of the Battle of Waxhaws in South Carolina on 29 May 1780. That was a lopsided bloody victory for the British...

Yesterday I started quoting a 29 Apr 1776 letter from the Rev. Dr. Samuel Cooper to Samuel Adams about Boston’s defenses soon after the B...