Highlighting the best of the best history Twitter feeds, below are Rag Linen’s Twitter Top 50 on History (in no particular order), representing our favorite history-related microbloggers.  The list includes educators, historians, authors, enthusiasts, institutions, reenactors, students, genealogists, tour guides and more.  Given the content of raglinen.com, there is a clear slant toward 18th century American history, so feel free to recommend your favorite history-related Twitter accounts in the comments to help provide balance.

@SecondVirginia @amhistorymuseum @EJBrand @historyadv @RevolutionaryPA @MOPrinting @BibliOdyssey @LooknBackward @HistoryLais @mercpol @GentlemanAdmn @BirkbeckEMS @ThomasJefferson @kenhalla @rarenewspapers @bostonhistory @GeoWashington @TheHistoryWoman @EMhistblog @Historianizer @PaulRevereHouse @lucyinglis @bencarp @Boy_Monday @Boston1775 @history_geek @DaintyBallerina @OspreyRich @Medievalists @EarlyAmerica @RagLinen @historytweeter @PocketHistory @HistoryChannel @EMhistblog @AFHistorian @maineroots @jmadelman @HouseHistorian @katrinagulliver @LincolnBuff2 @dancohen @jmcclurken @warof1812 @HistoricNE @ushistorysite @russeltarr @colonialwmsburg @samuelpepys @bschulte

According to a November 1, 1773 letter from an officer in New York to his friend in London, seven weeks before the Boston Tea Party, :

All America is in a flame on account of Tea-Exportation. The New-Yorkers as well as the Bostonians and Philadelphians, are, it seems, determined that no Tea shall be landed. They have published a paper in numbers called the Alarm. It begins first with “Dear Countrymen,” and then goes on exhorting them to open their eyes, and like the Sons of Liberty throw off all connection with the tyrant their Mother Country. They have on this occasion raised a company of artillery, and every day almost are practicing at a target. Their independent companies are out at exercise every day. The minds of the lower people are inflamed by the examples of some of their principals. They swear that they will burn every ship that comes in; but I believe our six and twelve pounders, with the Royal Welsh Fuziliers, will prevent any thing of that kind.

The Alarm being referenced was a broadside authored by John Dickinson in which urged “Beware of the East-India Company.”

The exact excerpt from above, as published in the April 18, 1774 Dunlap’s Pennsylvania Packet, under the dateline London, January 25, appears below. Following are two more interesting letter extracts from the same newspaper that present excellent perspective and insight into the colonial (not just Boston) tension percolating in late 1773 and early 1774.

Also read Boston 1775’s “Boston Mobilizes Against the Tea“.

The first episode of History Channel’s “America: The Story of Us” stated that the value of the tea dumped into the harbor during the Boston Tea Party was $1 million. That reminded me of Dunlap’s Pennsylvania Packet from April 18, 1774, which published some interesting post-party items, including one about the value of the tea.

According to the Packet, “it is said that the tea thrown into the Sea at Boston is valued at 18,000 l. at 1s. 6d. per pound. The whole sent to America is said to be worth about 300,000 l. which is returning home, not being suffered to be landed.”

Using the Bank of England’s inflation calculator, £18,000 in 1774 (I rounded up) translates to £2,023,200 today.  That’s an average of two percent inflation per year. Converting £2.023 million to USD via XE.com, I found the value of the tea destroyed on December 16, 1773 to be $3,091,687 (more than $2 million higher than the History Channel’s estimate).

According to Wesley Griswold’s The Night The Revolution Began “the figure varies with nearly every source, and ranges from as low as £8000 to as high as £18000.”

So I checked to see if the History Channel was using the low estimate.  Using the £8000 variable, I found today’s value of the tea destroyed on December 16, 1773 is $1,374,083 (still much higher than the History Channel’s quote).

If £8000 was the low estimate and £18,000 was the high, that leaves £13,000 as the median estimate. Figuring £13,000 would be the most accurate measure, I threw it in the inflation and conversion calculators and found today’s value of the tea dumped in Boston harbor on December 16, 1773 to be $2,232,885.

Can anyone tell me how/where the History Channel came up with $1 million?  What’s the most accurate estimate?

Supplementing his weekly Massachusetts Spy newspaper, perhaps to satisfy a demand for more hard-hitting anti-British essays and illustrations, Isaiah Thomas printed the first issue of Royal American Magazine in January 1774.  The magazine was published every month until the eve of the Revolutionary War and featured Paul Revere and John Hancock among its many contributors.

“Besides the usual variety of general literature, this work contains a faithful summary of the public transactions of Boston during that eventful year, and great value is added to the work by the public documents preserved in its pages,” according to Samuel Burnside, Memoir of Isaiah Thomas, Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society.

Below is an early — possibly the earliest — advertisement for the premier issue of Royal American Magazine, as published in Thomas’ Massachusetts Spy on October 14, 1773.

Source: The Pennsylvania Packet, September 13, 1773

The October 16, 1781 Pennsylvania Packet includes several early October reports about the American and French forces surrounding Cornwallis at Yorktown.  Here is the first one from that issue.

Despite the abundance of lumber in 18th century America, the technological and chemical combination for making wood pulp paper wasn’t discovered until the mid-19th century.  During the 18th century and first two-thirds of the 19th century, American newspapers were printed on paper made from linen rags.  Pictured below are 10 American newspapers dated between 1750 and 1796, each printed on rag linen paper.  Notice each paper’s distinct characteristics — shape, size, color, texture, etc.

According to J.L. Bell’s Boston 1775 blog, colonial “printers collected [rag linen] to give to their paper-makers so they could eventually have more paper to print on. Particularly during the war, when imports from Britain were scant, newspapers contained a lot of advertisements asking homemakers to bring in scraps of linen for recycling.”

Colonial printers were more likely to print newspapers and pamphlets on American-made paper while importing higher-quality English or Dutch paper for their most important jobs (i.e., book printing and perhaps the most newsworthy items).  According to The Colonial Printer by Lawrence C. Wroth:

It must be understood that the paper made in colonial America, especially in the early days, was not the finest in quality. The word “handmade” has a connotation in these days that dazzles the intelligence even of persons ordinarily unimpressed by shibboleths. The American paper of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, handmade, of course, from rags, was an honest paper, tough and durable in general, but as variable in quality as one would expect from indifferent materials handled by provincial workmen in rude manufactories.

The variance in quality didn’t dilute its durability.  Thanks to the strength and sturdiness of “homemade” rag linen paper, the first drafts of colonial America’s most historical events are often well preserved in printed form. It’s these historic accounts, printed on the pages of newspapers, that come to life in the Rag Linen blog.

The 235th anniversary of the Battle of Lexington and Concord is quickly approaching, so the unveiling of this collection is very timely.  Below is the introduction to Rag Linen’s Battle of Lexington and Concord collection.

“The New England militia were elaborately organized and actively led. On the morning of April 19, 1775, they stood against Thomas Gage’s Regular Infantry in fixed positions and close formations at least six times. Twice the Regulars were broken. In the afternoon, the American leaders changed their tactics. Now facing a larger enemy and artillery, they forged a moving ‘circle of fire’ around the British force and maintained it for many hours — an extraordinary feat of combat leadership with citizen soldiers.

“After the fighting was over, many of these same men, including Paul Revere and Thomas Gage, fought the second battle of Lexington and Concord. This was a contest for what their generation was the first to call popular opinion, and even more decisive than the battle itself. Yankee leaders were victorious in spreading their version of events through the colonies. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Thomas Paine all testified that the news of Lexington was, in Adam’s phrase, their revolutionary Rubicon,” according to Paul Revere’s Ride by David Hackett Fischer (1994).

Rag Linen’s Battle of Lexington and Concord collection provides evidence of the rush, by both sides, to influence public opinion via the rapid dissemination of letters, newspapers and commentary. The collection features an exciting mix of primary source material from the days, weeks and months following April 19, 1775.

The first item, the Postscript to the Pennsylvania Journal dated April 27, 1775, is the only one of its kind known to exist in either institutional or private hands. It includes extracts from three letters, two of which may be whole, and one that was penned on the same day as the battle. Also featured is a London newspaper printing Gen. Gage’s official battle account. American newspaper printers, after reading Gage’s report, took their turn correcting and commenting on his version of events. As part of the counterpoint, the Connecticut Journal on August 23, 1775, prints: “To reason on the facts, which are now indisputable, is to talk which will better suit some future opportunity. The public have but to ponder on the melancholy truths thus attested by government. The sword of civil war is drawn and if there is truth in Heaven, THE KING’S TROOPS UNSHEATHED IT.” Click here to view the collection.

“Always brutal and everywhere fierce, King Philip’s War, as it came to be called, proved to be not only the most fatal war in all of American history but also one of the most merciless,” Jill Lepore wrote in her award-winning book The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (1998).

The back cover summary of Lepore’s book reads: “In 1675 Algonquian Indians all over southern New England rose up against the Puritan colonists with whom they had lived peacefully for several decades. The result was the bloodiest war in American history, a terrifying conflict in which the Puritans found themselves fighting with a cruelty they had thought only the natives capable of.  By August 1676, when the severed head of the Wampanoag leader, King Philip, was displayed in Plymouth, thousands of Indians and English men, women, and children were dead. More than half of the new towns in New England had been wiped out, and the settlers’ sense of themselves as civilized people of God had been deeply shaken.”

One of the earliest printed accounts of King Philip’s War (that Lepore cited in several instances and even pictured in her book) appeared in the August 16 to 19, 1675 issue of the London Gazette.

As the lead report, spanning two-thirds of the London Gazette’s front page (the first time the Gazette had dedicated so much space to the American colonies, which alone underscored the severity and importance of the news), is a letter from Benjamin Batten, the son of Sir William Batten.

Benjamin Batten “happened to be in Boston when that fateful Indian uprising began, and my attention was drawn to him by a letter he wrote to Sir Thomas Allin, Comptroller of the Navy, relating in considerable detail the daily news of the trouble in Plymouth Colony down to the sixth of July, 1675.” (Benjamin Batten and the London Gazette by Douglas Leach, printed in the New England Quarterly 1963.)

The carnage is not diluted for the London Gazette readers:

• “In their journey they had seen lying the bodies of several English without heads, who had been murthered by the Indians…”
• “We had advice, that 16 English were killed in skirmishing and 7 Indians…”
• “And that 14 houses belonging to the English near Swansey, had been burnt…”
• “An Indian Spy had been executed at Plymouth…”
• “Having only seen ten Indians together, of whom they killed four; they found 6 English heads, and twice as many hands, being of those the Indians had murthered…”

Below is the famed issue of the London Gazette containing Batten’s letter about the first days of King Philip’s War. Click to enlarge.

The May 9, 1775 Pennsylvania Evening Post (Philadelphia) included a short description of the Massachusetts and Connecticut delegates arriving in New York en route to Philadelphia for the Second Continental Congress, which was the congress that managed colonial affairs during the Revolutionary War and declared independence from Britain 14 months later.

Dateline: New York, May 8, 1775

“They were met a few miles out of town by a great number of the principal gentlemen of the place, in carriages and on horseback, and escorted into the city by near a thousand men under arms; the roads were lined with greater numbers of people than were ever known on any occasion before. Their arrival was announced by the ringing of bells, and other demonstrations of joy. They have double centries placed at the doors of their lodging.” See the full article below.

Later in the same issue, under the dateline Philadelphia, May 9, we read about the arrival of the delegates from Virginia, North Carolina, Maryland, etc.

Dated six weeks after the Boston Tea Party, “Letters from Boston complain much of the taste of their fish being altered: Four or five hundred chests of tea may have so contaminated the water in the harbour, that the fish may have contracted a disorder not unlike the nervous complaints of the human body.” The letter, which was sent from Boston to London, and eventually printed in the April 18, 1774 Dunlap’s Pennsylvania Packet, is pictured below (click to enlarge):

Last week, J.L. Bell wrote on  his Boston 1775 blog about Gen. George Washington’s arrival in Cambridge to take command of the Continental Army. Washington was accompanied by Gen. Charles Lee, an experienced British officer who was bitter about not being appointed Commander in Chief and, according to Wikipedia, had nothing but the utmost disdain for Washington. The Boston 1775 blog post references a letter in which Lee wrote: “We arrived here on Sunday before dinner. We found every thing exactly the reverse of what had been represented.”

Lee’s privately-shared frustration with the actual state of the army may have also been publicly evident from his short one-paragraph response to his welcome address.  By comparison, Washington wrote a three-paragraph response. Certainly, this may be an analytical stretch, but it’s interesting to read Lee’s private critical assessment and compare it to his public response, as published in the June 29 to July 6, 1775 New England Chronicle. This newspaper was printed from Stoughton Hall at Harvard College in Cambridge, making it the likely first report of Washington’s July 3rd arrival.

Washington’s response, printed in the same issue, is straight forward and sympathetic to the circumstances under which the army was formed.  As J.L. Bell comments, the army was still reeling from the Battle of Bunker Hill.  In the second paragraph of his response, Washington states:

“The short space of time which has elapsed since my arrival does not permit me to decide upon the state of the army. The course of human affairs forbids an expectation that troops formed under such circumstances, should at once possess the order, regularity and discipline of veterans — Whatever deficiencies there may be, will I doubt not, soon be made up by the activity and zeal of the officers, and the docility and obedience of the men. These qualities united with their native bravery and spirit will afford a happy presage of success, and put a final period to those distresses which now overwhelm this once happy country.”

Click the detail image above or this link to read the entire page from the July 6, 1775 New England Chronicle that features the welcome addresses and responses from Washington and Lee upon their arrival at Cambridge.