Boston 1775

I’ve written several postings about Solomon Brown , even suggesting he might have been responsible for the first shot in Lexington on the m...

Elijah Sanderson has appeared on Boston 1775 several times, but usually as a source on other people’s experiences of the April 19 battle....

Here’s what appears to be an authentic document from 19 Apr 1775. It was sold by Heritage Auctions in June 2017, but the company has preserv...

Back in 2020 the Spared & Shared website, which usually presents documents from the U.S. Civil War, published the transcript and scans o...

With yesterday’s posting, Boston 1775 has entered the Patriot’s Day season for 2024. It’s hard to find a complete posting of Patriot’s Da...

So far this month I’ve been looking at the publishing history of Lt. Col. Robert Donkin ’s Historical Collections and Remarks , particularly...

As discussed yesterday , Lt. Col. Robert Donkin distributed Historical Collections and Remarks to most of his subscribers in the spring of...

We left Maj. Robert Donkin in 1777 with probably hundreds of copies of his Military Collections and Remarks needing to be shorn of a footn...

The 18 Apr 1768 Pennsylvania Chronicle included this advertisement: James Smither, Engraver, At the first house in Third Street , from t...

Maj. Robert Donkin ran advertisements in the New-York Gazette promoting his upcoming book Military Collections and Remarks and thanking t...

I profiled Maj. Robert Donkin (1727–1821) back in 2021 , which was 212 years after someone drew this profile of him as a retired general. ...

Daniel P. Jordan, director and then president of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello for over twenty years, died earlier this month. Ann Lucas, ...

The Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia has just unveiled a webpage displaying seventeen letters written by Continental soldi...

Next month Westholme Publishing will issue The Journal of the American Revolution Annual Volume 2024 , edited ably once again by Don N. Hagi...

On the evening of Tuesday, 2 April, I’ll speak in Acton at the invitation of the Acton 250 Committee. We’re calling this talk “The Gather...

Yesterday’s posting took Lt. John Ragg of the British marines to Middletown, Connecticut , as a prisoner of war along with his servant, ...

The Battle of Brooklyn on 27 Aug 1776 didn’t end well for the Continental Army . Gen. Sir William Howe ’s forces inflicted heavy casualties...

On the afternoon of 27 Aug 1776, British and Hessian soldiers under Gen. James Grant advanced on a Continental force, including men from...

From the start of nationhood Americans have spoken of the “thirteen colonies,” but really it was more like twelve and a half. The Penn fam...

In June 1776, Lt. John Ragg of the marines was in Halifax, Nova Scotia , with the rest of the British military force evacuated from Boston...