- by J. L. Bell
J. L. Bell
I’m a writer specializing in the history of the American Revolution in New England. I grew up in a suburb of Boston during the Bicentennial years, and the stories we celebrated during that time stuck with me. But I’m even more excited to find stories and details that aren’t so well known or may never have been told before.
The easiest way to sample my writing is to check out my website at Boston1775.net. I update that site daily with doses of history, analysis, and unabashed gossip about Revolutionary New England. The most lucrative way to sample my writing (for me) is to buy “The Road to Concord,” my take on what set off the Revolutionary War.
In addition, I’ve contributed chapters and articles to a number of other books: “Children in Colonial America” by James Marten; “Reporting the Revolutionary War” by Todd Andrlik; and volumes of the “Journal of the American Revolution” and the “Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife.” I’m an assistant editor and one of the writers of “Colonial Comics: New England,” edited by Jason Rodriguez.
We’re now passing through the Sestercentennial, or 250th anniversary, of the events that led up to the creation of the U.S. of A. as an independent republic. In 1766 Americans celebrated how Parliament had repealed the Stamp Act, the first big rift between Britain and its North American colonies. Everyone felt the crisis was over. No one knew what was coming up. That’s the big story I find so fascinating.
The easiest way to sample my writing is to check out my website at Boston1775.net. I update that site daily with doses of history, analysis, and unabashed gossip about Revolutionary New England. The most lucrative way to sample my writing (for me) is to buy “The Road to Concord,” my take on what set off the Revolutionary War.
In addition, I’ve contributed chapters and articles to a number of other books: “Children in Colonial America” by James Marten; “Reporting the Revolutionary War” by Todd Andrlik; and volumes of the “Journal of the American Revolution” and the “Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife.” I’m an assistant editor and one of the writers of “Colonial Comics: New England,” edited by Jason Rodriguez.
We’re now passing through the Sestercentennial, or 250th anniversary, of the events that led up to the creation of the U.S. of A. as an independent republic. In 1766 Americans celebrated how Parliament had repealed the Stamp Act, the first big rift between Britain and its North American colonies. Everyone felt the crisis was over. No one knew what was coming up. That’s the big story I find so fascinating.
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Blog postBack in 2014 I wrote about finally finding online copies of the journals of the Massachusetts House through the HathiTrust.
Though the books themselves were online at long last, it wasn’t that easy to find particular volumes. But HathiTrust is a vast, changing resources. Here are some updated pages to start from.
For the bulk of eighteenth-century Massachusetts House records, volumes 1-50 and 52-55 covering 1715 to 1779, start at this page. Be aware that the syst17 hours ago Read more -
Blog postIn a letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush in Philadelphia dated 19 Sept 1775, Gen. Charles Lee complained about the Continental Army’s New England troops. And then he complained about Rush’s colleagues at the Continental Congress. And then he complained about how he was supposed to be addressed. Gen. Lee saw a lot to complain about that day.
Lee’s letter started with a mention of action at “Bunker’s Hill,” but he didn’t mean the big battle in June. In late August the wing of the army under hYesterday Read more -
Blog postYesterday we left the Rev. John Cleaveland, Jr., at odds with his Stoneham neighbors in 1794. The trouble was his second marriage to young Elizabeth Evans, until recently his housekeeper and apparently not even a dedicated member of the church.
As the Congregational Library says in its description of meetinghouse records from Stoneham: “While the church chose to support Cleaveland, the town did not, and both Cleaveland and the church building itself were targets of the town’s ire.”2 days ago Read more -
Blog postJohn Cleaveland was born in the part of Ipswich that’s now Essex in 1750. He was the son and namesake of the town minister.
John, Jr., apparently grew up expecting to study at Yale, where his father had graduated five years before his birth. But that didn’t work out.
Mortimer Blake’s A Centurial History of the Mendon Association of Congregational Ministers (1853) said Cleaveland had a younger brother and “the father being unable to support both in college, decided to tr3 days ago Read more -
Blog postSunday, 17 September, is Constitution Day because that’s the anniversary of when the remaining members of the Constitutional Convention signed their proposal for a new national governmental structure.
Of course, that document had no legal standing at that time. It didn’t become the blueprint for the U.S. of A.’s government until it was ratified in the summer of 1788. But the ratification date is harder to pin down—was the crucial moment New Hampshire’s conditional approval as the ni4 days ago Read more -
Blog postTomorrow is Cambridge Discovery Day, when the city’s historical commission promotes a day of free walking tours in various neighborhoods (full schedule in this P.D.F. download).
At 3:00 I’ll kick off a tour called “Children of the Revolution: Boys & Girls in Cambridge During the Siege of Boston.” The description explains:Children comprised more than half the population of colonial New England. Not only did they get caught up in the start of the Revolution, but some were drawn i5 days ago Read more -
Blog postOn 8-10 Nov 2018, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Delaware will host a conference on “Coming to Terms? Confronting War and Peace through the Visual and Material in the Atlantic World, 1651-1865.”
The conference committee has issued this call for papers:How does war end and who ends it? Historians often turn to diplomacy and formal politics to answer this question. It is clear, however, that a much broader populatio6 days ago Read more -
Blog postThe Harvard Gazette shared an extraordinary interview with university law and history professor Annette Gordon-Reed.
She talks about experiences ranging from being the first black student at her East Texas elementary school to running from the World Trade Center complex during the 2001 terrorist attack.
Here are portions of Gordon-Reed’s thoughts on how Thomas Jefferson was a slaveholder and the Adams family were not:I suppose I have come to know different Jeffersons a1 week ago Read more -
Blog postIt’s an Election Day in the city where I live, so I’m linking to Rosemarie Zagarri’s essay “What Did Democracy Look Like? Voting in Early America” at Mapping Early American Elections, a project of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.
Zagarri writes:There was, for example, no uniformly established day on which to hold elections. In New England and New York, for example, elections tended to occur in the spring for legislative gatherings that1 week ago Read more -
Blog postOn 17 June 1777, the young Rev. John Eliot wrote from Boston to his New Hampshire friend and colleague, the Rev. Jeremy Belknap.
Eliot’s letter discussed, among other topics, foreign press coverage of the ongoing Revolution:We have here among us some Irish Magazines which Capt [Samuel] Smedly took lately [in a naval capture]. I wish you could see them. There is plenty of matter edifying & entertaining. Your brother & I think them far beyond any thing of the kind that we have1 week ago Read more -
Blog postOn 22-24 September, Fort Ticonderoga will host its fourteenth annual Seminar on the American Revolution, focusing on “the military, political, and social history of the American War for Independence.”
These seminars attract more than a hundred historians, researchers, reenactors, educators, and others interested in the Revolution. Presentations take place in the Mars Education Center under a wing of the fort.
I attended a smaller symposium there in August and had a fin1 week ago Read more -
Blog postThis T-shirt, labeled “Revolutionary Superheroes,” is one of the offerings at The History List.
These five early American heroes don’t have secret identities. The shirt comes with a tag identifying each person briefly, copy written by me. (No royalties involved.)1 week ago Read more -
Blog postLast weekend the Boston Globe ran a story about a proposal to mark the site of Dr. Joseph Warren’s house in Boston, depicted here.
And where is that spot? As Charles Bahne determined for Warren biographer Samuel Forman a few years back, Warren’s house is under City Hall Plaza. Reporter Sara Salinas wrote:The expansive brick-and-concrete plaza often draws criticism for appearing unwelcoming, even as the city has tried to rebrand the plaza as a place for civic engagement and communit1 week ago Read more -
Blog postFor the sesquicentennial of American independence in 1926, the Saturday Evening Post commissioned a cover image of Benjamin Franklin. The magazine traces itself back to the Pennsylvania Gazette, which Franklin printed and published in the mid-1700s.
Norman Rockwell, already a star at what his time deemed mere illustration but previous centuries called history painting, portrayed Franklin at a desk with a writing quill. The face and especially the hair, loose and not under a wig, mat1 week ago Read more -
Blog postOn Tuesday, 12 September, Camille Arbogast will speak at the Lyman Estate in Waltham on “A Tale of Two Domestics: Adventures in Archival Archaeology.” This event is co-hosted by Historic New England, owner of the estate, and the Waltham Historical Society.
The talk description says:In 1772, Ruth Hunt, a thirteen-year-old from Concord, Massachusetts, was formally indentured to the family of the local minister. A generation later, Mary Tuesley, recently arrived from England, was hire1 week ago Read more -
Blog postAs stated in a passage I quoted a couple of days ago, soon after Charles Townshend died, his post as Chancellor of the Exchequer was offered to Lord North, who accepted it on 11 September. That quick succession made the British government of the time seem more stable than it was.
The leading minister in London was William Pitt, Earl of Chatham. Normally the prime minister was also First Lord of the Treasury, but Pitt had instead taken a peerage and the post of Lord Privy Seal. His a2 weeks ago Read more -
Blog postYesterday I quoted Horace Walpole’s immediate response to the death of Charles Townshend in September 1767. Townshend had a big personality full of contradictions, and he seems to have both fascinated and exasperated his political peers—who expressed themselves so handsomely.
Walpole had more to say about Townshend later in his Memoirs of the Reign of King George III:On the 4th of September, 1767, died Charles Townshend, of a neglected fever, in, I think, the forty-second year of h2 weeks ago Read more -
Blog postOn 24 Aug 1767, the British politician Thomas Whatley wrote to former boss George Grenville about gossip he’d heard from yet another Member of Parliament, Grey Cooper:He told me that the Chancellor of the Exchequer [Charles Townshend, shown here] having been not well of a long time, and he observing that he looked still worse a few days ago, he advised Lady Greenwich [Townshend’s wife, made a baroness just days before] to send for a physician;
she at first said that Mr. Townshend’s2 weeks ago Read more -
Blog postFor the Smithsonian, Stephen Coss, author of The Fever of 1721, explores the ups and downs of Benjamin Franklin’s relationship to Deborah Read: As every reader of Franklin’s Autobiography knows, Deborah Read first laid eyes on Benjamin Franklin the day he arrived in Philadelphia, in October 1723, after running away from a printer’s apprenticeship with his brother in Boston. Fifteen-year-old Deborah, standing at the door of her family’s house on Market Street, laughed at the “awkward ridiculous A2 weeks ago Read more
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Blog postIn the coming weeks, Cynthia and Sanford Levinson will speak in various Massachusetts venues about their new book, Fault Lines in the Constitution: The Framers, Their Fights, and the Flaws that Affect Us Today.
This book is an exploration of the U.S. Constitution designed for readers aged ten to eighteen. School Library Journal said:The book functions differently than a straightforward explanatory text on the U.S. Constitution. Rather, the authors examine the fissures and issues tha2 weeks ago Read more -
Blog postJohn and Dolly Hancock were known for hosting dinner parties in their mansion on Beacon Hill (shown here shortly before it was torn down).
According to James Spear Loring’s Hundred Boston Orators (which cribbed freely from older sources), they even built “a lofty and spacious hall on the northern wing of his mansion, extending sixty feet, devoted to festive parties, and built of wood.” That wing was removed in the early 1800s, so it’s not in this photo.
On 6 June 1791,2 weeks ago Read more -
Blog postTiconderoga, New York, boasts the most accurate recreation of the Hancock mansion that used to stand on Beacon Hill.
The merchant Thomas Hancock built the original and passed it to his nephew John.
The replica was erected in 1925, long after the original was torn down, based on detailed architectural drawings. It is the headquarters of the Ticonderoga Historical Society.
Now the society is also the owner of a dinner table that was in the Hancock mansion, a2 weeks ago Read more -
Blog postAmong George Mason’s objections to the proposed U.S. Constitution of 1787 was that it gave too much power to the President.
Specifically, Mason feared that a President would abuse the power to pardon criminals. On the back of a committee report, he wrote:The President of the United States has the unrestrained power of granting pardons for treason, which may be sometimes exercised to screen from punishment those whom he had secretly instigated to commit the crime, and thereby prevent3 weeks ago Read more -
Blog postIn 2008 I posted a multi-part inquiry into the legend of Richard Stockton, a signer of the Declaration of Independence from New Jersey.
According to the standard story, in late 1776 the British forces captured Stockton and treated him so badly that he was in poor health until he died from the consequences in 1781. That story led to New Jersey honoring Stockton in multiple ways, including putting his statue in the U.S. Capitol as a state hero.
I pointed out that:Stockto3 weeks ago Read more -
Blog postYesterday I quoted the start of John Adams’s description of his first visit to Princeton in August 1774, when he was on his way to the First Continental Congress.
Adams viewed the college’s Nassau Hall, the mansion of Judge Richard Stockton, the Rittenhouse orrery, and equipment for electrical experiments (which didn’t work in New Jersey’s humid August).
Adams’s account continues:By this Time the Bell rang for Prayers. We went into the Chappell, the President [John Wi3 weeks ago Read more
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