Boston 1775

In the immediate aftermath of the Continental Congress’s vote for independence in early July 1776, almost all the Massachusetts delegation ...

After Boston’s first anti-Stamp Act protest in 1765, Lemuel Robinson changed the sign outside the tavern he owned in Dorchester (shown above...

On 3 August 1776, Elbridge Gerry sent a second letter to his Continental Congress colleagues Samuel and John Adams . Gerry wrote this ...

Elbridge Gerry left Philadelphia on 16 July 1776, heading for home in Massachusetts with a pound of green tea . His fellow Continental Co...

As I related yesterday , in July 1776 John Adams arranged for Elbridge Gerry to carry a pound of green tea home to Abigail , as long as ...

The month of July 1776 was a fraught time for John Adams . Not just for the reason we all remember in story and song, but also because he ...

Back in 2012, I picked up a local news report that the Andover board of health had issued orders for the owners of the house where Jacob O...

Drew Gilpin Faust, historian of the ante-bellum South and president of Harvard University from 2007 to 2018, recently spoke to N.P.R. about...

On 27 Aug 1773, 250 years ago today , Jacob Bates met with the Boston selectmen . As I discussed back here , Bates had become celebrated ...

Here’s another source on the Revolution recently digitized: eight handwritten volumes of Dr. Benjamin Rush ’s “Travels Through Life: or Acc...

Earlier this month the Clements Library in Ann Arbor announced that it had started posting digital images from the Papers of Gen. Thomas Gag...

Before getting too far from the literary salon of Sir John Riggs-Miller and Anna, Lady Miller , I want to note that the novelist Frances Bu...

Here are a couple of online events focusing on John Adams folks might be interested in. On Thursday, 24 August, the hosts of the History C...

Last month the Journal of the Early Republic ’s Panorama website published an essay by Blake McGready titled “Searching for a Reusable Past...

Sarah Robinson (1720–1795, shown here) was the younger sister of Elizabeth (Robinson) Montagu . In 1748 Robinson started sharing a house ...

What happened in Batheaston didn’t stay in Batheaston. Within three weeks after Christopher Anstey read his ode “Winter Amusements” and ...

After Christopher Anstey won Lady Anna Miller ’s biweekly poetry contest at Batheaston on 3 Dec 1778, as described yesterday , he waved asi...

Christopher Anstey (1724–1805, shown here by William Hoare ignoring his daughter and her dolly) was the son of a Cambridgeshire minister w...

Anna Riggs (1741–1781) was the daughter of a London Customs official , granddaughter of a wealthy Irish Privy Councilor. Riggs’s mother w...

On Friday, 18 August, the American Revolution Institute will host one of its “Lunch Bite” seminars , looking at a copy of Catharine Macaulay...