Boston 1775

On Friday, 15 May, the Lexington Historical Society is hosting its annual Cronin Lecture—but this year the talk will be online. The even...

Last fall, I discussed a moment when John Quincy Adams discovered that his younger brother Charles had been reading his diary without p...

The Skinner auctioneers blog offers Christopher D. Fox’s detailed discussion of firefighting and leather fire buckets in Boston. In par...

Several years back, Alyssa Connell wrote at Cooking in the Archives about a handwritten cookbook in the collection of the University of P...

Toward the end of their 8 May 1770 town meeting , Bostonians turned to approving salaries for the town’s schoolteachers. There were five...

At 3:00 P.M. on 8 May 1770, after their midday dinners, the white, propertied men of Boston returned to Faneuil Hall to resume their town...

On 8 May 1770, 250 years ago today , Bostonians gathered for one of their annual town meetings . Every March, the white men of the town ...

Here’s another sampling of online events involving Revolutionary New England history to watch for. Fort Ticonderoga The historic site ...

The Colonial Society of Massachusetts ’s publication of the correspondence of Francis Bernard and Thomas Hutchinson , royal governor and ...

A couple of days back I recounted the story of how Jonathan Sewall tried to convince his friend John Adams to accept an appointment as ...

Yesterday I learned a word: paraph It means the fancy squiggle that people like John Hancock added to their formal signatures, as sho...

With the pandemic, almost every historical site, museum, and society that hosted events has now pivoted to organizing and promoting online...

Jonathan Sewall ’s attitude toward politics might seem cynical to us. Sewall played the eighteenth-century patronage game, angling for a...

Both men would hate that I’m making a combined announcement, but new volumes of the Papers of Thomas Hutchinson and the Papers of John Ad...

My curiosity about how colonial Boston periodically coerced free black men into mending town highways began years ago when I came across ...

Yesterday I described how in 1707 Massachusetts and Boston instituted a legal system of drafting free black men to work a certain numbe...

Yesterday I mentioned how colonial Boston selectmen ’s records periodically include lists of the free black men in the town in connection w...

It’s hard to find traces of the Rev. Dr. Cotton Mather ’s enslaved servant Onesimus after the minister grudgingly manumitted him in late...

As recounted yesterday , in July 1716 the Rev. Dr. Cotton Mather determined that he needed to “dispose of” his enslaved servant Onesimus...