Boston 1775

Yesterday I started to analyze a letter that Great Barrington militia colonel and politician Mark Hopkins wrote to the Massachusetts Co...

Yesterday I quoted briefly from a letter that Mark Hopkins of Great Barrington sent to the Massachusetts Council on 30 Mar 1776. Hopkin...

In 1766, at the age of thirty-one, Peter Ingersoll opened a tavern and inn in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. (It still exists in greatly...

On Thursday, 8 December, I’ll speak at the Newport Historical Society on the topic “The Launch of Rhode Island’s Revolutionary Artillery.”...

As I reported yesterday, George Washington has been our richest President so far. Most of his property consisted of land, both plantation...

Wikipedia’s entry on the wealth of U.S. Presidents has been updated with an estimate—and, in the absence of full financial disclosure, it c...

Last month Timothy Abbott shared on Facebook a glimpse of life in the British camp on Bunker’s Hill in late 1775. After the battle of 17 J...

Years back, I gave a teachers’ workshop at the Paul Revere House in the North End. It took place upstairs in the neighboring Pierce-Hichb...

The first ten issues of the Rebels comic book have been collected in a single volume from Dark Horse. The series was conceived and script...

On 1 Dec 1775, Pvt. Aaron Wright , stationed in Cambridge , wrote in his diary about a fellow rifleman: John M’Murtry, in Capt. [James] Cha...

When we left off the 1859 book Twelve Messages from the Spirit of John Quincy Adams , the spiritual medium Joseph Stiles had just channeled ...

There’s a pretty fierce competition for the strangest Revolution-related book that I’ve encountered this year, but one very strong competi...

Today instead of writing about books I’ll write about a podcast about books. Earlier this year Helen Lewis, deputy editor of the British ...

One of the folks who contributed expertise to the “Parker’s Revenge” project I discussed yesterday is Daniel M. Sivilich, president of th...

Last month the Friends of Minute Man National Park published the final report on the Parker’s Revenge Archeological Project. I first post...

I’m pleased to report that The Road to Concord: How Four Stolen Cannon Ignited the Revolutionary War is now available in digital form for...

In the spring of 1761 there was an argument in the pages of Edes and Gill ’s  Boston Gazette over whether the dinner to celebrate the ins...

Caroline Cox’s Boy Soldiers of the American Revolution was published earlier this year by the University of North Carolina Press. Unfor...

I had the honor of meeting the artist Tom Feelings shortly before his death in 2003 when I drove him to a writers’ conference in New Hamps...