The American Philosophical Society has digitized eight handwritten volumes of Declaration of Independence signer Dr. Benjamin’s Rush‘s “Travels Through Life.” J.L. Bell has the story at Boston 1775. A taste: Here’s another source on the Revolution recently digitized: eight handwritten volumes of Dr....
In his leaked decision overturning Roe v. Wade, Samuel Alito wrote, “The inescapable conclusion is that a right to abortion is not deeply rooted into the Nation’s history and tradition.” Is this true? It is hard to define what “deeply...
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....
What happened when British soldiers and their families arrived in Boston in 1768? In Episode 66 of The Way of Improvement Leads Home Podcast, we talk with Carleton College history professor Serena Zabin about her new book, The Boston Massacre:...
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...
Some of you may recall back in July 2017 when we featured University of Alabama religion professor’s Mike Altman‘s book Heathen, Hindoo, Hindu at The Author’s Corner. It is an excellent book from an excellent scholar of American religion. Today on...
Over at Boston 1775, J.L. Bell introduces us to Benjamin Vaughan (1751-1835), a British radical politician who wrote to Thomas Jefferson about religion in 1801. Here is a taste of Vaughan’s March 15, 1801 letter to the new President of...
Here is J.L. Bell at Boston 1775: Last month Dennis Baron, a professor of English and linguistics at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, published an op-ed essay in the Washington Post on the language of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Two new databases of...
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...
Last week we published a post on Stockton University‘s decision to remove a bust of Richard Stockton from its library. Stockton was a New Jersey revolutionary and signer of the Declaration of Independence. The bust will be replaced with a...
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...
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...
We have been trying to keep the readers of The Way of Improvement Leads Home up to speed with some of the best stuff out there on the 250th anniversary of the Stamp Act. See our recent posts here and here....
