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 ...
Massachusetts Provincial Congress Adjourns on the Eve of Revolutionary War
This is a quick follow up to my previous post that featured the 1775 April 17 issue of the Boston Evening-Post. That issue, published by Thomas and John Fleet two days before the Battle of Lexington and Concord, turned out to be its second to last issue under the Fleet brothers. From the same issue, ...
The Massachusetts Spy Moves to Worcester, Loses Readers, Never Returns to Boston
Without any mention in the issue, the 1775 April 6 edition of Isaiah Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy — featuring the famous serpent “Join or Die” cartoon in the name plate — was his last from Boston. As the colophon states, it was printed at the “South-Corner of MARSHALL’s-LANE, leading from the MILL-BRIDGE into UNION STREET,” Boston. ...
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 Top 10 Colonial News Sources
According to The Development of the Colonial Newspaper by Sidney Kobre (1960) colonial news came from the following sources: 1 // Private letters, containing matters of general interest, sent to residents or to the publisher 2 // Ship captains and sailors at the dock or tavern 3 // Merchants receiving or sending goods 4 // ...
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 Only Newspaper Announcing Paul Revere’s 1776 Military Promotion to Lieutenant Colonel
Paul Revere was a silversmith, engraver, political activist and express rider known for alarming Boston’s countryside on the night of April 18, 1775. Far less known about Revere is his military role during the Revolutionary War. According to The Life of Colonel Paul Revere, Volume 1, by Elbridge Henry Goss: “When the British troops evacuated ...
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. ...
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. ...
