Boston 1775

I profiled Maj. Robert Donkin (1727–1821) back in 2021 , which was 212 years after someone drew this profile of him as a retired general. ...

On the last day of the year 1775, Boston merchant John Rowe , staying inside besieged Boston , wrote in his diary : The Niger man of War Ca...

Earlier this month Independence National Historical Park shared the photo above on Facebook. That posting stated: This scrap of newspaper ...

I enjoyed reading Renée Wolcott’s essay on investigating a copy of Poor Richard’s Almanac from 1737, recently shared by the American Philos...

Yesterday at History Camp Valley Forge, the first presentation I attended was Ryan Strause’s talk about correcting the record on the Pennsyl...

Anisha Gupta and Renée Wolcott of the conservation department at the American Philosophical Society have shared an interesting series of blo...

As quoted yesterday , in July 1798 David Stoddard Greenough offered a “ONE DOLLAR REWARD” for the return of his teen-aged indentured servan...

Over the past couple of days, I’ve been quoting letters to the newspapers of Litchfield, Connecticut , about papermaker Elisha Horton ’s co...

Elisha Horton ’s letter detailing what he would have said in court about Julius Deming , quoted yesterday , was actually a response to a pre...

On 29 Jan 1806, the Litchfield Monitor , the Connecticut town’s Federalist newspaper, published a long letter from papermaker Elisha Horto...

As I looked for evidence of Elijah Houghton at the Boston Tea Party , I noticed that right before him on the more expansive lists was Elish...

For anyone who cares about preserving the papers of important Founders, Valerie-Anne Lutz recounted quite a heart-stopping adventure for th...

As I quoted yesterday, Isaiah Thomas grew up as an apprentice printer hearing stories about how his master, Zechariah Fowle , had helped t...

At the Junto blog, Jordan E. Taylor interviewed Framingham State professor Joseph Adelman about his new book, Revolutionary Networks: The...

The last installment of The Saga of the Brazen Head ended on 12 Sept 1735 with James Jackson drowning on a trip home from Maine . He le...

Before going on with The Saga of the Brazen Head , I’ll zip through what happened with Richard Fry . Under his contract for the  paper m...

In 1734 Richard Fry finally set about making paper at the mill built for him in Stroudwater outside Falmouth (now Portland), Maine , by ...

In September 1728 the Massachusetts General Court promoted local paper manufacturing by granting a ten-year patent to a group of investo...

Yesterday I related how the brazier James Jackson came to Boston from London and by December 1734 opened a shop called the Brazen Head ,...

This month’s Lowell Lecture Series at the Old South Meeting House , presented by the Paul Revere Memorial Association , focuses on how the...