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. ...
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 ...
President George Washington’s First Inaugural Speech
As a follow up to the previous post about the eyewitness account of George Washington’s 1789 inauguration, below are excerpts from the May 6, 1789 Massachusetts Centinel, which contains descriptions of the inauguration as well as the full text of Washington’s first inaugural speech, one of America’s 100 milestone documents.
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 ...
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. ...
King Philip’s War: “The Bloodiest War in American History”
“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 ...
Sons of Liberty: An Intercolonial Network of Organized Resistance
Stamp duty. When these two words touched American soil in April 1764 — as a teaser of the internal tax coming after the Sugar Act — they set in motion a chain of events that forever altered the course of American history. One ripple effect was the formation of the Sons of Liberty. To some, ...
A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre in Boston
At a town meeting on March 12, 1770 — one week after the Boston Massacre — James Bowdoin, Joseph Warren and Samuel Pemberton were appointed to a committee to prepare the Patriot account of the massacre. According to John Doggett Jr.’s 1849 enhanced edition of the Patriot account, during that March 12 meeting a “report ...
B. Franklin’s Confession to Leaking Hutchinson’s Letters
If a finger had to be pointed at one person for causing the American Revolutionary War, a strong case can be made for pointing it at Thomas Hutchinson. According to the Origins of the American Revolution by Andrew Stephen Walmsley (1999): Rarely in American history has a political figure been so pilloried and despised by ...
Paul Revere’s “View of the Year 1765″
Paul Revere’s engraving of Boston’s “Bloody Massacre” is one of his most well known works. As of this posting, more than 60 percent of the Google image results for “Paul Revere engraving” return his engraved depiction of the Boston Massacre. A lesser known engraving by Revere is his patriotic response to the Stamp Act, titled ...
