Boston Massacre Reconsidered: Dr. Serena Zabin Interview, Part I

The featured image brings together images of Dr. Serena and Adel Aali from the interview, alongside Paul Revere's 1770 engraving of the Boston Massacre, with the following text banner: "March 5, 1770: What Really Happened?"

Table of Contents

Updated: February 10, 2026

Reassessing the Boston Massacre and the Path It Paved to Revolution

Long before open hostilities, revolutionary thinking was shaped by Enlightenment ideas, as Dr. Sophia Rosenfeld explains in our program. These intellectual developments—the Age of Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, and the Age of Revolutions—reshaped how people in Europe and the American colonies thought about authority, governance, and rights.

But Dr. Rosenfeld also emphasize that ideas, intellectual or otherwise, do not by themselves start revolutions. Rather, actions and events ignite revolutions..

So, to fully grasp the American Revolution, we have to look closely at the events that shaped colonial perceptions of and posture toward British authority in the Pre-Revolutionary Era, generally understood as 1763 to 1775. I personally lean toward 1774 as the end of this period, because by 1775 the Revolution had truly begun with open hostilities at Lexington and Concord.

In Analyzing American Revolution, we explore this era through multiple perspectives. I examine the organizational foundation of the Revolution, principally the Committees of Correspondence and later Committees of Safety. Dr. Robert Gross examines the lead-up to Lexington and Concord, and Dr. Dael A. Norwood explores the China trade that underpinned the Boston Tea Party. I will link both interviews here when they publish.

This interview with Dr. Serena Zabin about the Boston Massacre contributes to the program by showing how moments of tension and conflict illuminate broader patterns in colonial life—linking social networks, civic organization, and decision-making across communities.

Here’s how I’ve structured this post:

  • Part I (this post): What really happened on the night of March 5, 1770? Paul Revere’s propaganda that shaped our perceptions.
  • Part II: Boston Massacre on Trial: How John Adams Defended the British and Bostonians
  • Part III: Breaking Up an Imperial Family — British Living Among Bostonians and Dr. Zabin’s Contribution to the Ken Burns Documentary (Part III will be published on Jan. 26, 2026.)

 

 

 

Rethinking the Boston Massacre with Dr. Serena Zabin

The Boston Massacre of 1770 is often remembered as a straightforward story of British soldiers firing on innocent colonists, but in this interview, Dr. Serena Zabin reexamines the event through the lens of people’s choices, social networks, and political tension.

Dr. Zabin explores how ordinary and elite colonists interpreted, responded to, and acted upon these events. She also enhances our understanding of how ordinary British soldiers, as well as officers and government elites, reacted to this rupturing event. She further reassesses whether revolutionary action was inevitable.

By tracing the choices, agency, and civic engagement of everyday people, she shows how revolutionary sentiment took root in practice—through social networks, community decision-making, and collective judgment—long before battles erupted at Lexington and Concord.

In essence, the Boston Massacre was more than a moment of violence; it was a subtle revolution of choice and action, unfolding in Boston streets and taverns, which Dr. Zabin thoughtfully brings to life in this interview.

About My Guest – Dr. Serena Zabin 

Dr. Zabin is a professor of history and the Liberal Arts at Carleton College.

She is the Vice President of the Teaching Division of American Historical Association, a distinguished fellow in Early American History at the Huntington Library for 2024-25, and a former president of Society for Historians of the Early American Republic.

Her research focuses on Early America and Public History, subjects about which he has published extensively, including the following books:

  • Dangerous Economies: Status and Commerce in Imperial New York,
  • The New York Conspiracy Trials of 1741: Daniel Horsmanden’s “Journal of the Proceedings” with Related Documents, and
  • The Boston Massacre: A Family History, which received the 2024 George Washington Book Prize and is the focus of this interview.

Dr. Zabin is the 199th guest scholar of the History Behind News Program, and Analyzing American Revolution is a special series of our program.

To learn more about Dr. Zabin, you can visit her academic homepage.

 

These two books by Dr. Zabin are not specifically discussed in this interview. We do, however, explore her other work  — “The Boston Massacre: A Family History”. Scroll down for that discussion. 

 

Transcript of My Interview with Dr. Zabin

The notes below are excerpts from the edited transcript of my November 2026 interview with Dr. Zabin. You can watch the full interview in the video immediately below, and for convenience, I’ve also linked specific video clips to their corresponding sections in the transcript.

 

 

What Happened on the Night of March 5, 1770

Adel: Dr. Zabin, it’s a pleasure to have you in our program’s special series. Thank you for taking the time for this conversation with me about the American Revolution.

The Boston Massacre is a story we all know or think we know, right? We learned it in middle school and high school, and you and I are going to dig deep into it and perhaps talk about some stories that people may not know.

But before we go there, can you just set the scene for us? Just kind of remind us, what happened on the evening of March 5, 1770?

Dr. Zabin: Yes. So great question. What we actually know, for sure, is actually a pretty limited set of facts.

So, we know that on March 5, 1770, around nine o’clock in the evening, there was a sentry in front of a British Army soldier in front of a customs house in the center of Boston, right in the heart of Boston. And he’s walking around trying to stay warm. It had just snowed.

 

 1. Image of a British Soldier, 29th Regiment of Foot. British soldiers of the Boston Massacre belonged to this regiment. Soldier, 29th Regiment of Foot
Painting, c. 1742 (Public Image)
The soldiers on March 5, 1770, belonged to this regiment,
including Captain Thomas Preston and his grenadiers
The sentry referenced by Dr. Serena Zabin was Private Hugh White, who was standing guard outside the Boston Custom House on King Street—known today as State Street.

 

So, it’s kind of a snowy, wet, mucky day.

And a number of teenagers come by, and other people walk in the street too, but a number of teenagers come by. They sort of start hassling him.

Maybe they start throwing a few snowballs. They’re sort of tussling. You can imagine what teenagers in the street are like.

Other people start to show up.

Adel: Teenagers are throwing snowballs at a soldier? That takes a lot of guts

Dr. Zabin: Well, they’re sort of tussling with each other.

I mean, they certainly are taunting him. He’s sort of stuck in this little box area right in front of the customs house. He’s not really supposed to leave his space.

So, they are kind of teasing, right? Pushing.

And he yells back. I mean, he’s not just sort of taking it.

But there are other people in the street, and more people start to come. And somewhere, and the sequence of timing here is a little unclear even, as more people come, the sentry decides he wants a little backup.

 

The Boston Massacre as depicted by Paul Revere in his 1770 engraving titled The Bloody Massacre Perpetrated in King-Street Boston on March 5th 1770 by a Party of the 29th Regt.The Boston Massacre as depicted by Paul Revere in his 1770 engraving titled “The Bloody Massacre Perpetrated in King-Street Boston on March 5th 1770 by a Party of the 29th Regt.” (Public Image)

 

And about the same time, people start to hear church bells ringing. So, the bells start to ring, and the sentry blows his whistle, trying to get some attention from the guardhouse just a few hundred yards away, really. And the captain of the day and a handful of soldiers, probably eight soldiers, come marching out just about a block.

And they come through the streets, which they are finding increasingly crowded. People are coming out to see what’s going on. Some people think that the bells indicate that there’s a fire.

They come out with their fire buckets, looking to be part of the fire brigade. And other people just come to see what’s happening. More and more people start coming into the street.

At some point, the officer yells at everybody just to go away. Nothing really happens. They ignore him for the most part.

And it gets louder. It’s dark. There’s no streetlights in Boston, by the way.

So it’s hard to figure out exactly what’s going on at nine o’clock on a March night.

And at some point, someone yells fire. And it’s very unclear who yells fire.

Because it could be that someone is saying, where is the fire? Here I am with my bucket. It is possible that some people are yelling at the soldiers saying, you don’t dare fire at us. Because of course, they can’t fire without a command and really without reading the Riot Act.

And some soldier believes that what he heard was a command to fire.

But all we know is that indeed, there are guns fire. And when the smoke clears, there are five people dead or dying, three immediately dead, one dies within a few hours, one a couple days later, on the snow in front of what is the seat of imperial power, the big statehouse, what we now call the statehouse, what they then call the Town House in the center of Boston, another six people are injured.

And nobody exactly knows why or how that word got shouted. That’s about as much as we know.

Was the Boston Massacre Really a “Massacre”?

 

Adel: Wow. Let me key in on one thing that you said. I’ve often thought about this. And this is not to sort of make light of what happened.

Five people died. One person is significant. You know, five is very significant. That’s not the point.

But we know this event in Britain, I think it’s called the incident or something [the Incident on King Street]. But in our country, we know this event as the Boston Massacre, quote unquote.

So as massacres in those decades and centuries ago, was this a massacre?

Dr. Zabin: I know it’s I mean, my colleagues who work on the 20th century say this is the morning’s work for a drone. You know, what is, you know, five people? Is that a massacre?

So I mean, certainly, it is that term massacre is a political term. It was chosen by the Sons of Liberty almost immediately thereafter, I mean, within a day.

And there is a sort of PR war about how to describe what happened. And obviously, this one, the Sons of Liberty won, because that’s what we know it as.

I think we might more accurately call it a shooting. It absolutely is a shooting.

But yes, the word massacre is just really here meant to do political work, as opposed to descriptive.

Adel: We’re going to get to the PR part in a second.

And I think that’s just a story on its own that we really didn’t learn back in middle school and high school and even college for that matter.

But there’s one thing that as I was preparing for this interview, intrigued me. And it’s this and I was looking at some of your work.

 

Boston Gazette newspaper report, March 12, 1770, four days after the funeral. The illustration of the coffins shows the initials of the four victims buried March 8.Boston Gazette, March 12, 1770—four days after the funeral of the Boston Massacre victims on March 8. (Public Domain). Initials on the coffins identify the four men buried that day: (1) Crispus Attucks, (2) Samuel Gray, (3) James Caldwell, and (4) Samuel Maverick. The fifth victim, Patrick Carr, was not included in this report because he died on March 17.

But there was also a sixth victim: Christopher Monk. He was gravely wounded in the Massacre (shot in the side/groin) and died in 1780 from his injuries, around age 27.

 

Did British Soldiers and Bostonians Know Each Other?

Adel: Did any of the soldiers, whether they shot or not, know people in the crowd?

Dr. Zabin: Absolutely. Boston’s not a big town, 16,000 people. So, you know, and that’s one of the biggest towns in North America.

But soldiers had already been living there for 17 months.

And yes, a couple of the soldiers who end up being prosecuted for the shooting, know and see people in the crowd, they talk to them, their neighbors come over and say, hey, what’s happening? And they chat as they’re marching out to support this century.

So yes, people really did know each other in the small world.

Adel: That’s a different story than what we know, right?

Dr. Zabin: Yes, it’s a really different, it’s a different story. I think we never pay attention to that.

Adel: Now that now that you say that, so there’s a sentry in front of the customs house, which later, I think was called butcher’s house [Butcher’s Hall]. And we’re going to get to that or something to that effect.

 

Butcher's Hall encircled for emphasis in 1770 The Boston Massacre engraving by Paul Revere.In Paul Revere’s 1770 engraving of the Boston Massacre (cropped in this image), Butcher’s Hall is circled in dark blue for emphasis, and the Custom House is highlighted in bright blue.

 

So these eight soldiers and their captain, I think it’s called Preston. Did I say that correctly? [Dr. Zabin inaudibly affirms.] They’re going to help this sentry.

And as you said, they’re actually chatting with some people they know on neighbors.

So, it’s the next day, right? This, the Boston massacre happens. Were like Bostonians and the British administrators surprised? Like, how did this happen? Or were they sitting and thinking, you know what, this was going to happen?

Did the British and Bostonians Anticipate Violence?

Dr. Zabin: I think both of those things are true.

They don’t wait till the next day. I mean, there’s an all-night crisis, right?

The governor comes out that, you know, as soon as the shootings over, I mean, it happens essentially underneath the balcony of his office. He comes out, and he tells everyone to go home.

And he promises that the law will have its course. He says, we will investigate. If something illegal happened, you know, I promise, he says to the people of Boston, that we will do this through the courts.

And so he, you know, starts rounding up all the people that he can, who will tell him what happened, some of the political people on both sides.

And about three o’clock in the morning, the officer in charge and the soldiers turn themselves in, they are in jail. So just a few hours later, really, once they’ve talked it through a little bit, by the next morning, certainly, the town meeting, which is the sort of political body that runs Boston, has organized themselves already, they start taking depositions from people who say that they have a story to tell about what happened that night.

And the line is so long within an hour, like, okay, this is not going to work, we’re going to actually start coming around to you, we’ll have to figure out some other way of doing it. But we can’t just have people standing in line, waiting to tell us what happened. They put together that little committee, and the town meeting themselves deputizes a number of the Sons of Liberty to go to the Governor and say, you have got to get these soldiers out of Boston today, we are not waiting.

And so there’s some negotiation, but absolutely, people are investigating, they’re trying to figure out what happened.

The army also is trying to collect depositions pretty fast. They don’t, they’re not quite as organized, they don’t get it together by nine o’clock the next morning, because they’re trying to figure out how to deal with this captain who’s in jail.

But there is an investigation. But the investigation is not really to find out what happened so much as it is to figure out who to blame.

Adel: I see.

This is an investigation with an angle.

Dr. Zabin: Absolutely.

Adel: Who to blame.

What I got from what you just shared with me is the Governor – was it Hutchinson? Gage comes later.

Dr. Zabin: It’s Hutchinson.

Adel: This is Hutchinson. He immediately, this is like, you know, 2-3am. This starts at 9pm. So we’re talking dead of night.

He immediately gets into damage control.

Dr. Zabin: Exactly.

Adel: And the town just rallies to deal with this. How did this happen? Who knows? So the other thing, so one damage control, the other thing is, in Boston’s colonial history at this stage, from what I gather is that this is a big deal.

Dr. Zabin: It is a big deal.

I mean, it’s a big deal to see to see soldiers shoot civilians and watch them bleeding on the steps of the, you know, of the essentially the governor’s home and the governor’s office. That’s, that’s not nothing.
I mean, soldiers are also horrified.

You know, the officers are horrified. This is a big I mean, it’s a big deal. It’s a big deal.

Visually, it’s a big deal. Politically, it’s a big deal personally.

So yes, there has never really been something like this before.

There have been other riots in Boston. Certainly, riots are not uncommon in the 18th century in a world in which most people can’t vote. That’s the way in which lots of people express their political opinions.

Adel: Including back in England.

Dr. Zabin: Including back in England, so many riots in England.

I mean, that’s this is the big age of rioting. So that piece is not the surprising, scary part.

The you know, the hard part is the part where soldiers actually shoot people who die, which does not always happen with 18th century muskets.

And, and then it happened right, right in the heart of town. Yeah, that part was pretty bad.

Adel: Yeah.

You talked about the visual impact of this, you know, people on the steps or doorsteps of a major government building, the major government building in Boston, and sort of the sight of people just bleeding and dying there.

Earlier, I told you that we would come back and talk about PR, right?

So let’s talk about the visual PR that I even remember seeing this, you know, 40 years ago. And that’s Paul Revere’s engraving of this.

Talk about that. Like, well, yeah, I’ll just…

Paul Revere’s Depiction of the Boston Massacre

Dr. Zabin: yeah, it has to be one of if not the most famous 18th century American image. I think, you know, it is everywhere these days, I do not believe that there is a single textbook for middle school or high school that doesn’t have it in it.

And, you know, and at the time, it had fairly wide distribution also. So to back up a moment, it’s based on a drawing that actually a different young man named Henry Pelham, sort of had started and Revere kind of gets hold of it. And he’s the one who puts out the actual engraving.

 

1765 portrait of Henry Pelham and his depiction of the Boston, which was later used by Paul Revere. 1765 portrait of Henry Pelham by John Singleton Copley (his half-brother), alongside Pelham’s depiction of the Boston Massacre, titled “The Fruits of Arbitrary Power, or The Bloody Massacre”, which was later adopted, revised, and used by Paul Revere. Both images are in the Public Domain.
Click for image backstory.

 

And engraving, of course, can be duplicated very quickly, as opposed to a drawing, which, you know, Henry Pelham feels, you know, like, like somebody scooped him, essentially.

But, you know, Revere creates this image in which he tells the story that the Sons of Liberty want to have told, and it’s very vivid, it’s very clear. And, you know, what you see, this is a good moment for me to sort of walk folks through what they would see in the engraving.

 

So you see on the one side, this line of soldiers, right, all lined up, sort of standing together, you know, one foot forward, you see Captain Preston behind them, safely behind them, right, waving his sword. So he’s obviously urging them on, it’s very clear he is not going to be in a line of fire. Right.

Adel: The way I remember the engraving, he’s sort of pointing his sword forward.

Dr. Zabin: Absolutely, right up in the air, sort of waving the mob, but yes. So and they’re sort of leaning into it happily.

And on the other side, you see this kind of mass of Bostonians, all of them, you know, fairly well dressed, you’re certainly not seeing they’re the kind of apprentices and sailors and street people that you otherwise might have seen.

And there is in the middle of it, this one woman. And we think there’s probably were a few more women than that on the street, although not a lot.

But this image has right in the middle, one woman dressed in black with her hands crossed against her breast, you know, looking terrified, or distressed.

But really, you know, what her image is doing there, what her presence is doing is telling the viewer that this group of men are, you know, respectable, they’re a place where a lone woman could feel safe for her own, her own physical safety, right?

The people to be afraid of are not these guys, they’re the soldiers.

So and then you see a couple of people already bleeding out, there’s a lot of gore, right? And these engravings are all hand colored later.

So some of them have like really red gore.

And some of them have the most famous person who are the person who will become the most famous person to die as sailor named Crispus Attucks. Some of them color him darker, he was a mixed African of African descent and indigenous descent.

And some of them have the most famous person who are the person who will become the most famous person to die as sailor named Crispus Attucks. Some of them color him darker, he was a mixed African of African descent and indigenous descent.

And then right in the middle, dividing the soldiers and the townspeople is all of the smoke, right?

And we know the smoke is there, people talk about needing for it to clear. But the smoke is really just a line that divides the center of the picture, as Revere puts it together, right?

And that nothing about this part is true.

I guess the other piece I should point out is that it does what the soldiers are in front of a building that’s labeled Customs Hall, but Revere himself wrote above it, Butcher’s Hall, right?

Which was not on, it was not a sign that was on the Customs House.

Boston Massacre Conspiracy Theories

Adel: Speaking of Customs House, there’s also, I was looking at this last night, and there’s also in one of, there are three windows, I guess it’s on the second floor, on the furthest to the left, it seems like someone’s shooting out of the Customs House?

Dr. Zabin: Yes. So that’s another one of the stories that has been very hard to pin down.

And in fact, the courts themselves couldn’t figure out whether there was really an incident there or not.

But certainly what the Sons of Liberty were claiming is that there were sympathizers for the army who are up there shooting out the window.

And they were in a world, you know, which is maybe unsurprising.

There’s a kind of number of conspiracy theories floating around, right?

There’s, I don’t know, 11 people are dead or injured. It’s not quite clear how there could have been 11 bullets. Was there really time for somebody to reload? Or-

Adel: You said there were only eight soldiers.

Dr. Zabin: Right, exactly. So how could there be 11? Eight soldiers. How could there be 11? Did some ricochet off the stone? That seems likely, at least one person claims that a bullet does ricochet.

So, there’s never been, there certainly is evidence that there were people up there. There’s never been any evidence that’s been convincing, you know, or there wasn’t in the 18th century, any convincing argument that that’s where the other bullets came from. But you can see why that was tempting.

What Paul Revere Exaggerated—or Invented

Adel: So are there any, is there anything specific that you think Paul Revere exaggerated or even misrepresented?

I can probably point to a couple of them. One is, well, let me not point, let me ask you, you’re the expert.

Was there like the woman being in the middle? This is really interesting.

I’d never thought about it. This is by design. This is something that it would have meant a lot to people in the 1770s, right?

Dr. Zabin: Yes.

This just says something. This is not a photograph of the street scene, right? This is the story he’s telling. So yeah.

Adel: I asked that question specifically because as I read this, about this event, this massacre in detail, the people there were, I forget all their occupations, but kind of like sailors, seamen, and these are not sort of thing that they’re, they’re clothes. I’m not saying they’re not respectable, but—

Dr. Zabin: They are not middle class. Most of them.

Adel: Yes.

Dr. Zabin: And that clothing is very middle class.

Adel: Yeah. It could have been like ruffians out there in the streets. I see.

And you’re suggesting that there’s no evidence for that window shooting. The butcher house obviously was not there.

How Much Can We Really Know About the Boston Massacre?

Adel: And how about Captain Preston, whose sword, I said, I noticed that is sort of pointing forward.

Did he order people to shoot?

Captain Thomas Preston (1722-98).
After his trial, Preston retired from the army. He reportedly settled in Ireland. Adams later recalled seeing him in London in the 1780s, when Adams was serving there as U.S. Minister to Britain.

In 1822, Adams recalled that he saw Preston once in London during the 1780s, when Adams was serving as the U.S. Minister to Britain, though this was a fleeting moment and not a formal meeting. 

 

Dr. Zabin: Well, that again, I think is that that’s a really unanswerable question.

I think it’s unanswerable.

So I do think that what happened that night is, you know, in many ways, opaque, sort of literally, as I said, there’s not much light, right? The only light is really from, you know, little candles or other things in people’s windows.

You know, a couple lanterns, there’s not much light, people couldn’t see much.

But more than that, I do think that people tried very hard at the time to figure out what happened. They actually take hundreds of depositions.

Most of them are somewhat contradictory. And so what I came to understand as I worked on this book [The Boston Massacre: A Family History] is that there was no way that 250 years later, I was going to be able to see something in this evidence that other people at the time did not when that was really the question they were asking, they really wanted to know, did Captain Preston give the order to fire? Right? And nobody could quite totally figure that out. We can talk afterwards what the court said about that.

 

Cover image of "The Boston Massacre: A Family History", Dr. Serena Zabin's book discussed in this interview.

 

But really, what I came to realize is that the, you know, the things that we can know, are not necessarily the things that the parties at the time cared about hiding. Right?

They, they didn’t—

Adel: Repeat that last sentence again, please. The things that we—

Dr. Zabin: The things that we can know now, right, turned out to be things that the people in the past, the parties who were involved, were not trying to hide, right?

They’re trying to hide all sorts of other things. They’re trying to shape a story, right?

But it turns out that they’re not that concerned with questions about, you know, back to your first question, did the soldiers know the people on the street, right?

So one of the stories that Revere is telling in that engraving is that the soldiers are on one side of the street, and the civilians are on the other side.

Well, all of the eyewitness testimony tells us that they’re all mixed up together. They’re pushing each other, they’re touching each other, they’re arguing, you know—

Adel: So not this clear, two columns.

Dr. Zabin: Nothing like that. But it’s definitely nothing like two columns.

And that’s true. In fact, you know, that that’s actually true. But it’s also metaphorically true.

In fact, the soldiers and the civilians really knew each other pretty well.

They were all mixed up together. They’ve been living together, they’re neighbors, right? They’re not actually these enemies shooting at each other yet.

That’s not the story, really. That’s just the story Revere is trying to tell us.

But it turns out that all kinds of evidence for how much these people knew each other, how involved they were in each other’s lives, that stuff’s just sitting around in plain sight, because nobody was trying to hide that story, right? But the story of what actually happened that night with that word fire, that one is almost impossible to say.

Revere’s Motivation

Adel: So, impossible to say, yet Revere says a lot with his engraving, which leads me to ask this question.

What was in his mind?

Did he have revolution and independence in mind with this PR/propaganda, or did he just want more rights?

Like, you know, get rid of British tariffs, get rid of this and that. And this is March 1770.

So by then we already have a decade since 1763, end of the French and Indian War (1754-63) of British acts coming and going, right?

So Bostonians are ticked off. So what’s his motivation?

 

Portrait of Paul Revere by John Singleton Copley, circa 1768. (Public Domain). 

 

Dr. Zabin: They are. They are right.

But it is not, you’re quite right, it is not independence, it is not revolution, right?

I mean, it’s what is really most explicitly about is an objection to having troops in Boston, what the 18th century referred to as a standing army, right, as opposed to just a militia that organizes when needed and then disappears again.

The idea that there should be a standing army in wartime was completely, I mean, excuse me, in peacetime, right, in peacetime, a standing army in wartime, of course, right? You need it. The, you know, Massachusetts men were very willing to join the Seven Years’ War [1756-63].

But when it comes to actually peacetime, there should not be a standing army at all. They believe that that was a deep violation of their rights, that the likelihood that a king was going to turn a standing army on its citizens in order to claim their liberties was a deeply held idea that was developed by John Locke at the end of the 17th century. It’s an idea that especially colonial thinkers really hold on to, right?

So this fear of losing their liberty is tied closely to the idea of what is it that a king is going to do with troops? And when troops show up in Boston, you know, Sons of Liberty, who are, you know, identifying themselves by their British liberties, kind of freak out.

 

Discover more about the Boston Massacre, its trials and aftermath, and broken imperial family in Parts II and III:

 

Boston Massacre on Trial: How John Adams Defended the British and Bostonians

 

Breaking Up an Imperial Family — British Living Among Bostonians and Dr. Zabin’s Contribution to the Ken Burns Documentary (Part III will be published on Jan. 26, 2026.)

 

About the Featured Image

The featured image brings together images of Dr. Zabin and Adel Aali from the interview, superimposed on the Betsy Ross flag, alongside Paul Revere’s 1770 engraving of the Boston Massacre, with the following text banner: March 5, 1770: What Really Happened?

 


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About HbN Program:

The History Behind News program (HbN) is committed to making in-depth history researched and written by scholars enjoyable and accessible to everyone. Our motto is bridging scholarly works to everyday news.

The histories we’ve uncovered encompass an impressively wide range of subjects from ancient history to U.S. politics and economy to race, women’s rights, immigration, climate, science, military, war, China, Europe, Middle East, Russia & Ukraine, Africa and the Americas to many other issues in the news. We also receive advanced copies of scholarly books and discuss them in our program (in the context of current news).

Adel Aali in presenting podcast preview to AAR

Adel Aali, host. Snapshot from his introductory video to AAR podcast. Click to learn more about AAR.

199 Scholars & Counting:

Our guests are scholars in prestigious institutions, such as Oxford, Yale, Caltech, Harvard, MIT, Stanford, the Hoover Institution, the American Enterprise Institute, Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, King’s College London, Princeton University, Notre Dame, Dartmouth College, University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, the Atlantic Council, Duke, Amherst College, University of Michigan, Rhodes College, Emory University, Northwestern Law, Vanderbilt University, US Naval War College, Air Command and Staff College, Marine Corp University, UVA, Johns Hopkins, Cornell, NYU, Rice, University of Chicago, White House Historical Association, Baylor University, USC, UC Berkeley, UCSF, UCI, UCSD, UC Davis, UCR, Tel Aviv University, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Israel Democracy Institute, University of Aberdeen, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, University of Navarra, University of Seville, Helsinki University, Diego Portales University (Chile), Lund University (Sweden), University of Edinburgh, Near East University (Türkiye), Cardiff University, the Free University of Berlin and many others.

They include Pulitzer Prize winners, renowned documentary producers, former White House advisors and other high-ranking government officials, and current and former senior reporters at The Wall Street Journal and New York Times Magazine. Many have testified in Congressional hearings and others frequently contribute to major media outlets and widely read publications, ranging from the BBC, NPR, PBS and MSNBC to The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.

 


Think You Know the American Revolution?

AAR YouTube Community: Quizzes, Polls & Resources