Just because the British Empire was sliding toward internal warfare in 1774, that was no reason to stop laughing about the news. Here are a couple of items that appeared in New England newspapers 250 years ago. The first must have originated in a London newspaper. The earliest North American reprinting I’ve found is in John Dunlap’s Pennsylvania Packet on 18 Apr 1774. Four days later it appeared in both Isaiah Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy and Timothy Green’s Connecticut Gazette of New London, followed by other papers. Jan. 28. Letters from Boston complain much of the taste of their fish being ..read more

Last month the History of Parliament blog shared Dr. Robin Eagles’s review of Benjamin Franklin’s dislike and distrust of John Wilkes, based on his correspondence in Founders Online. Eagles writes: Franklin was no friend of Wilkes, who was ejected from his seat in the Commons following the infamous affair of North Briton number 45 and the printing of the scandalous Essay on Woman. They had much in common – both running newspapers and having voracious appetites for knowledge. They may also have coincided at the so-called ‘Hellfire Club’. Yet Franklin was repelled by Wilkes’s excesses. I wrote ..read more

Yesterday I left Edward Rand dead on Dorchester Point. The man who had just killed him in a duel, Charles Miller, Jr., could have been arrested for murder, and their seconds were also open to criminal charges. After a bare-bones report on the duel, the 16 June Columbian Minerva of Dedham reported: Miller passed thro this town to the southward, on the morning of the same day, in a coach, attended only by his second. That second was Lewis Warrington (shown here), a nineteen-year-old midshipman in the U.S. Navy. Warrington was the natural son of Donatien-Marie-Joseph de Vimeur, vicomte de Rocha ..read more

As I quoted yesterday, the Constitutional Telegraphe of 17 June 1801 was the only Boston newspaper to report on the duel between Edward Rand and Charles Miller, Jr., three days earlier. I slyly broke off before the end of that passage: “…in which the latter was shot dead on the spot.” Not that the duelists’ names necessarily appeared in the newspaper in the same order as the first paragraph of this posting. So I’m still keeping the outcome of the duel from you. The Federal Galaxy of Brattleboro, Vermont, went into more detail on 29 June: Having agreed on seconds, they repaired to Dorchest ..read more

Last month the Times Observer newspaper of Warren, Pennsylvania, reported on an exhibit at the local historical society that included a letter from Dr. Joseph Warren, the city’s namesake. According to the society’s managing director, a man named John Blair donated the letter in 1976, not saying how he had obtained it. “It’s been housed in a safe at the Historical Society that hasn’t been inventoried so the letter had been forgotten to some degree.” A transcription of this letter was included in Richard Frothingham’s 1865 biography of Warren, so the text has been available to scholars. That ..read more

Prompted by Karen Kleemann’s article quoted yesterday, I looked at how Massachusetts newspapers treated the 29 Nov 1783 earthquake and found some interesting details. First, we’re used to a standard time extending across an entire time zone. But before railroads, every town had its own noon, and therefore its own perception of when something big happened. The Massachusetts Gazette and General Advertiser in Springfield said this earthquake was felt “at 40 minutes past 10 o’clock.” The Boston Gazette reported it at “about six minutes before eleven o’clock.” And the Salem Gazette pegged it “at ..read more

Last fall the Heidelberg Center for American Studies shared Katrin Kleemann’s remarks about an earthquake that rattled a lot of the northern U.S. of A. in late 1783. Kleemann wrote: Many of the diaries I studied in the American archives mentioned this earthquake—in Philadelphia, New Haven, Boston, and Worcester. Most of these entries are really brief, usually only consisting of a few words, such as the line “Between 10 & 11 [pm] a small shock of an Earthquake” from Cotton Tufts’ diary on 29 November 1783. He lived in Weymouth, Massachusetts. The fact that diarists from several different ..read more

Last month the Journal of the American Revolution published my article “Dr. Warren’s Critical Informant.” Built from postings on this site over the years, this article proposed an identity for the “person kept in pay” by the Boston Patriots in early 1775. Dr. Joseph Warren reportedly consulted that informant just before sending William Dawes and Paul Revere out to warn Samuel Adams and John Hancock of a British march on 18 Apr 1775. I also chatted about that article with Brady Crytzer in an episode of the Dispatches podcast. In addition, this month I received my contributor copy of the 20 ..read more

Today the grave of the two British soldiers killed at Concord’s North Bridge (and part of one soldier killed in Lincoln) is in Minute Man National Historical Park. The town of Concord began the process of preserving it, so it’s well marked. There are regular ceremonies to remember those men. Among the markers is one engraved with lines that James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) wrote after seeing the site and published in The Anti-Slavery Standard in March 1849. The full poem has more to say about Americans than British, and reflects Lowell’s ideas of race, historical progress, and his own New E ..read more

How many British soldiers are buried beside the North Bridge in Concord? On some night late in 1891, George R. Brooks and other local worthies took a cranium given up by the Worcester Society of Antiquity and interred it in the patch of ground beside the bridge long marked as the grave of two redcoats. In doing so, they believed they were restoring one of two skulls that had been removed from that grave decades before. That would have left slightly less than two British soldiers buried there. Those men were convinced that the phrenologist Walton Felch had dug up those skulls with the perm ..read more