Boston 1775

It’s still caucus season (at least in Nevada ), so I’m returning to the topic of the original caucus —the somewhat mysterious gathering of p...

Yesterday’s posting quoted four accounts of the brief panic inside Boston—inside Faneuil Hall , to be exact—at news of a Continental Army ...

After several days of having nothing to report in his diary, Boston selectman Timothy Newell recorded an unusual skirmish on 8 Jan 1776: Mo...

I’ve been writing about Boston’s caucus system for discussing who should serve in town offices, which brought up (as Ron commented ) the ori...

Last week I said that John Adams made the first documented use of the word “caucus,” but only by about one month. Boston’s “Caucus Club” w...

Yesterday’s posting quoted John Adams using the word “caucus” (or “Caucas”) in his diary in 1763, the earliest recorded use of that term f...

As the U.S. of A. digests the results of the 2008 Iowa caucuses, it seems timely to discuss the term “caucus,” which first surfaced in pre-R...

Yesterday I quoted Gen. George Washington ’s January 1776 report that Loyalists in Boston were hopeful that the Continental Army ’s new Gr...

Yesterday I quoted George III’s October 1775 speech in Parliament about the American rebellion. Copies were printed in Boston and sent out ...

On 27 Oct 1775, King George III addressed Parliament with his and his ministers’ views on the year’s developments in America, and what the...

Eighteenth-century America had a tradition at the turn of each year for printers’ apprentices and other young employees to print up and dist...

To show off and sell its useful but expensive Archive of Americana digital databases, the Readex company offers a few online samples, inclu...

Yesterday the Bush-Cheney administration produced a mini-constitutional crisis when the White House released a memo stating that the Presid...

Continuing to clean out my “nifty links” file at the end of the year, I realized I never got around to discussing the latest issue of Common...

Here’s another interesting article from the Boston Review : Barbara Clark Smith ’s 2004 essay “Revolutionary Consent: What the public life o...

A Boston 1775 reader alerted me to an essay in the Washington Post last week by Mount Holyoke professor Joseph Ellis titled “What Would G...

One of my favorite Revolutionary War diarists is Col. Jeduthan Baldwin of North Brookfield, Massachusetts. He was an artillery engineer, w...

Last year I posted a recollection and a complaint about Christmas mumming, an old British tradition that surfaced in Boston shortly after ...

Today’s Boston Globe offers a review of Mr. Jefferson’s Women , by Jon Kukla . The reviewer is Prof. Michael Kammen of Cornell, whose A S...

Last month Boston 1775 reader Leslie Hauschildt contacted me with a question about fashionable women’s hair during the Revolution, and spec...