The Boston Massacre: A Permanent Rupture in the Imperial Family

Reconsidering the Boston Massacre – Part V The Boston Massacre can be understood as a kind of “family history”—and not just metaphorically. It was lived, quite literally, in the homes, streets, and relationships of Boston itself. When the Army Brought Its Families When British regiments arrived in 1768, they didn’t come alone. Alongside roughly 2,000 […]

The Boston Massacre Trial: Politics & Performance?

Reconsidering the Boston Massacre – Part IV If the shooting on King Street was chaos, the trials that followed were something else entirely—carefully staged, deeply political, and just as consequential. From the start, this wasn’t only about guilt or innocence. It was about perception—who could claim the moral high ground, not just in Boston, but […]

Paul Revere’s Depiction of the Boston Massacre – Confusion and Conspiracies

Reconsidering the Boston Massacre – Part III Paul Revere’s engraving of the Boston Massacre is one of the most famous images from 18th-century America—but it is not a neutral snapshot of what happened. And that’s really the place to start: this is not a photograph of a street scene. It’s a story. Revere wasn’t trying […]

In the Boston Massacre, Did British Soldiers and Colonists Know Each Other?

Reconsidering the Boston Massacre – Part II One of the most revealing and underappreciated layers of the Boston Massacre story is just how socially entangled British troops and Boston residents were before the shooting on King Street. It’s easy to imagine a rigid divide — angry townsfolk on one side and “British soldiers on the […]

Native Americans in the American Revolution: The History We Didn’t Learn

Native Americans and the American Revolution When Americans learn about the Revolutionary War, the story is usually framed as a conflict between the British Empire and the Thirteen Colonies. But this perspective misses one of the biggest players in the war: Native Americans. Militarily, economically, and—most importantly—reluctantly, Native Americans played a pivotal role in the […]

Concord’s Crisis: A Town Pushed to the Edge Long Before the Revolution

Introduction In this interview: “And they hold a muster and they don’t get enough people.” Watch this section in the video below (00:11:45). Concord, Massachusetts, on the eve of the American Revolution, was far from a small simple farming town. Beneath its seemingly quiet rural setting lay a community in social, political, generational and economic […]