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. ...
“The Reason of the King’s Wearing a Wig”
Source: The Pennsylvania Packet, September 13, 1773
The Beginning of the End: Cornwallis Trapped at Yorktown
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.
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 ...
