Tag: boston
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May 1775: The Patriot
This is the story of an American Patriot. He was from New Haven, CT, and his father died when he was very young; as a result, he could not afford to attend Yale with his cohorts. This left him with a sense of insecurity that he overcame by sailing on numerous trade voyages to the…
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April 19-24, 1775: Israel’s Ride
News spreads fast. Here’s how. On Wednesday, April 19, 1775, in Watertown MA near Boston, Joseph Palmer, a member of the Massachusetts Committee of Safety, learned about what had happened that morning in Lexington. He wrote and dispatched what has become known to historians as the ‘Lexington Alarm’: “To all the friends of American liberty…
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March 1775: Restraint
The timing on the next pair of decisions is almost funny. As previously noted, in the beginning of February 1775, Parliament in England had lost patience with the pesky colonials in Boston and had declared them to be in open rebellion. A ship bearing this decision set sail for America, and would arrive in Massachusetts…
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February 1775: Rebellion
In the beginning of February, 1775, the English Parliament was feeling snarky. On the first day of the month, they rejected William Pitt’s proposed plan for recognizing the authority of the Continental Congress and allowing the American colonists some measure of self rule – a plan known as the Provisional Act – by a whopping…
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January 1775: The Elder Statesman
On January 20, 1775, the most influential English politician of the century arrived at the House of Lords. This was William Pitt the Elder, Earl of Chatham, who had been Prime Minister of England from 1766 to 1768, and before that the guiding power behind two other Prime Ministers who had served from 1754 to…
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December, 1774: The Shot, Not
As the Anniversary of the Boston Tea Party approached, tensions were running high throughout New England. The port of Boston had been closed by numerous British ships, including a 50-gun man-of-war floating in the harbor, and another in the Charles River. The only entrance to the town was guarded by a regiment on either side…
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Fall 1774: Thanksgiving
250 years ago, Boston was an armed camp. In the wake of the Tea Party, a new Royal Governor was appointed to take control of the town and enforce the Intolerable Acts that had been imposed by Parliament. The guy who was chosen was none other than General Thomas Gage, the most noteworthy British soldier…
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May 1774: The Empire Strikes Back
On May 13, 1774, a large vessel sailed into Boston Harbor. It wasn’t a whaler, it wasn’t a trading ship of any kind. It was the HMS Lively, a 20-gun post ship of the Royal Navy that was commissioned in 1756 and had seen action against the French throughout the 7-Years War. But on this…
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Spring 1774: Intolerable
In the aftermath of the destruction of the Francis Scott Key bridge this past week, folks in Baltimore and throughout the United States can’t help wondering – as we head into what should usually be a spring full of promise – what the future may hold with the closure of one of the largest ports…
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