My first or second year at Messiah College, the student history club produced t-shirts with Ben Franklin’s famous “Join or Die” snake image (see above) on the front. It was partly an attempt to raise the club’s membership. Messiah is...
As someone who wrote extensively about homesickness in my first book, I thoroughly enjoyed J.L. Bell’s recent post at Boston 1775. He even mentions Philip Vickers Fithian! Here is a taste: One might assume the word was still working its...
As J.L. Bell reminds us at Boston 1775, today is the 247th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. While the Boston patriots dumped East India Company tea into the waters of Boston Harbor, not all revolutionary-era tea protestors involved dumping....
This is a great post from J.L. Bell at Boston 1775. A taste: I promised more cattiness from John Quincy Adams as a college student. In his diary for the year 1787, Adams inserted several profiles of his classmates and other people he met...
Over at Boston 1775, J.L. Bell writes about some 18th-century fake news. On October 22, 1730, Ben Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette published a report of a witchcraft trial in southern New Jersey: Saturday last at Mount-Holly, about 8 Miles from this Place, near 300...
My youngest daughter went to her first college class yesterday morning (Spanish I). She moved into the dorms last week and has managed to survive four full days of new student orientation. I think I will send her J.L. Bell’s...
Not familiar with the Great Fire of 1760? J.L. Bell of Boston 1775 fame offers a short introduction here. One the Bostonians who tried to make sense of the fire was Rev. Jonathan Mayhew. Here is a taste of Bell’s...
Over at Boston 1775, J.L. Bell calls our attention to a new exhibit at the Fraunces Tavern Museum in lower Manhattan. It is titled “Fear & Force: New York City’s Sons of Liberty.” Here is a taste of Bell’s post:...
Over at Boston 1775, J.L. Bell has a nice roundup of some of the best databases about enslaved people. Here is a taste: This is just one of several online databases about enslaved people that researchers can now use. There’s...
In 1774 the Continental Congress told Americans to avoid card playing: We will, in our several stations, encourage frugality, economy, and industry, and promote agriculture, arts and the manufactures of this country, especially that of wool; and will discountenance and...
This week the new Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia is getting all the press, but J.L. Bell reminds us that there is another museum of the American Revolution that recently opened at Yorktown. Â Bell paid a visit to...
Boston 1775 explains: In his “Sagittarius” letters of 1774, the Scottish printer John Mein referred to: the very honest Samuel Adams, Clerk, Psalm-singer, Purlonier, and Curer of Bacon. Mein was clearly being derogatory, but what exactly did he mean? To...
He took the exam in 1786. Over at Boston 1775, J.L. Bell tells us what happened. Here is a taste: Here’s John Quincy’s description of the test from his diary: Between 9 and 10 in the morning, I went to the...
Some of you may remember that a couple of weeks ago Donald Trump said this: [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neCW9RwwH6g&w=560&h=315] Many interpreted his remarks about “Second Amendment people” to mean that he was calling gun owners to take matters into their own hands...
This flag was designed in 1775 by Christopher Gadsden, South Carolina planter and delegate to the First and Second Continental Congress. Â The rattlesnake, as best as I can tell, was used as a symbol for the British colonies as early...
J.L. Bell is a historian and blogger at Boston 1775. This interview is based on his new book, The Road to Concord: How Four Stolen Cannon Ignited the Revolutionary War (Westholme Publishing, 2016). JF: What led you to write The Road to...
Check out J.L. Bell’s fascinating post at Boston 1775 about how colonists in Massachusetts married earlier than originally intended in order to avoid paying for a ten shilling stamp on their marriage certificates.  Another consequence of the Stamp Act. Here is a taste:...
This month marks the 250th anniversary of the Stamp Act Congress, a New York meeting of representatives from the British-American colonies to discuss the best way to resist the Stamp Act of 1765.Over at Boston 1775, J.L. Bell has been...
