Boston 1775

Back in June 2006, just weeks after I launched Boston 1775 , I shared my thoughts on whether Juneteenth should become a Massachusetts holid...

A few years back, Lee Wright of The History List showed me the art he’d commissioned for a T-shirt called “Revolutionary Superheroes.” It...

A friend alerted me that the Dollop podcast recently cited my name. The Dollop is a conversation about history between two comedians, Dav...

In the Washington Post , Prof. Andrew Wehrman wrote about Massachusetts and Boston’s official response to the threat of smallpox in the sum...

This weekend the New York Times published Jennifer Schuessler’s dispatch “The Battle for 1776,” about the relationship between the ongoing...

Yesterday I followed Sarah Gore and the uncle who raised her, the Rev. Henry Caner , from Boston to London after the end of the siege of B...

This story came up (in my head at least) during yesterday’s online presentation from King’s Chapel about how the Revolution affected membe...

Last month the Herald in Scotland reported on a collection of Indian art coming to the National Museums Scotland: Brought back from India ...

James Madison’s estate Montpelier was a slave-labor plantation.  In fact, Madison appears to have been comfortable with that. He didn’t wr...

Earlier this month, Ben at Extinct Monsters shared a report on Charles Willson Peale ’s mounted mastodon skeleton, now on exhibit at the Sm...

Among the toasts at the Royal Welch Fusilier officers ’ dinner on 1 Mar 1775 that I described back here was: “Our old friend.” Most of th...

Two historians I follow on Twitter published reviews of Alan Taylor’s American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783–...

Last August I wrote about John Adams ’s bequest to the town of Quincy intended to create a school , which would become owner of his extens...

At this posting earlier in the month, I said that the first documented use of the English word “homesickness” was in 1756 and that the adje...

Yesterday I shared the video preview of my presentation at History Camp America 2021, coming up on 10 July. There are seven more video pre...

Via Vimeo , here’s a preview of my video presentation “Washington in Cambridge and the Siege of Boston” prepared for History Camp America ...

The stories of the Royal Welch Fusiliers’ goat and the Battle of Bunker Hill are a good example of what I call “memory creep.” As one wri...

In 1832 the United Service Journal, and Naval and Military Magazine ran an unsigned article titled “Record of the Services of the Twenty-Th...

Francis Grose (1731-1791, shown here) had a short career in the British army , filling the lowest officer’s rank of cornet during the 1740s...

Robert Donkin was born in 1727 and by the eventful year of 1745 was an officer in the British army . In the Seven Years’ War he served as an...