18th Century Lessons for Today’s Debt Ceiling Crisis
Same old, same old? I couldn’t help but identify similarities and connect some dots between this 18th century essay, published in the 1766 January 23 edition of THE PENNSYLVANIA JOURNAL, at the height of Stamp Act resistance and the beginning of the American Revolution, to today’s debt ceiling/default crisis. Perhaps this 18th century newspaper article ...
The Origin of “Live Free or Die” and “Die or be Free”
J.L. Bell wrote today about “The Origin of ‘Live Free or Die’” on his Boston 1775 blog. He points to correspondence between a Vermont committee and General John Stark in 1810 as the source of New Hampshire’s motto. This past weekend, a similar slogan jumped out at me as I was reading the 1774 September ...
40,000 to 80,000 Men in Arms On Their Way To Boston
Chapter five is one of my favorites in T.H. Breen’s American Insurgents, American Patriots. It’s titled “The Power of Rumor: The Day the British Destroyed Boston” and focuses on “a frightening rumor that triggered an equally frightening response.” Below are excerpts from the September 16 and 23, 1774, issues of the New Hampshire Gazette that ...
Paul Revere’s Other Revolutionary Rides
According to research by Michael Kalin for Paul Revere’s Ride by David Hackett Fischer, between the winters of 1773 and 1775, Paul Revere had two dozen revolutionary rides. Each ride had a unique purpose, including explaining the Tea Party, spreading news of the Intolerable Acts, warning of British attacks and meetings with Whig leaders. One ...
Understanding the Colonial American Tea Trade
While reading Benjamin Carp’s terrific new book, Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party & The Making of America, I yearned for a supplemental reference guide to help me visualize the stages of the colonial American tea trade before and after the Tea Act of 1773. This past weekend, I reached out to @bencarp ...
Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America
Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America, by Benjamin L. Carp, is hot off the presses and available for sale today at your local book store or from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders, Powell’s and Yale University Press. Some online book stores still show a publish date as October ...
The Irony of the Boston Massacre and the Townshend Act
The Wikipedia entry for The Townshend Acts says the acts were “met with resistance in the colonies, prompting the occupation of Boston by British troops in 1768, which eventually resulted in the Boston Massacre of 1770. Ironically, on the same day as the massacre in Boston, Parliament began to consider a motion to partially repeal ...
John Dunlap’s Proposal for Launching a Colonial Newspaper
To help launch his colonial Philadelphia newspaper, John Dunlap turned to his brethren printers in Boston to publish “proposals for printing by subscription, a weekly news-paper, entitled The Pennsylvania Packet, And General Advertiser.” The inaugural issue of Dunlap’s newspaper was printed printed on October 28. Dunlap was the printer of the first copies of the ...
The Colonial Tea Alarm of 1773
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. ...
Calculating Today’s Value of the Tea Destroyed on December 16, 1773
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. ...
Advertising the Launch of Royal American Magazine
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. ...
Unexpected Consequence of the Boston Tea Party?
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 ...
