Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Boston (MA)
In the shadow of Bunker Hill, bigots perpetrated an atrocity that showed a shocked nation that the fires of the Reformation still burned in the New World
On a sweltering Monday afternoon in July, 1834, Edward Cutter of Charlestown, Massachusetts, was startled by the sudden appearance of a woman in his house.
An Autumn Harvest of American Still Lifes
The 1831 painting exhibition at the Boston Athenaeum was the cause of much rejoicing on the part of the critic for the prestigious North American Review , with a single salient exception: he had no use for still lifes.
On September 7, three hundred and fifty years ago, a ragged group of Puritans under John Winthrop chose a site on the New England shore and declared it suitable for a new town—one more pinprick of settlement for a land in which they hoped to find the spiritual regeneration that
When The Great Earthquake struck New England, learned men blamed everything from God’s wrath to an overabundance of lightning rods in Boston. Two hundred and twenty-five years later, geologists are at last discovering the true causes.
Shortly before dawn the five-inch pine spindle of the Faneuil Hall wind vane snapped, dislodging the thirty-pound gilded cricket that spun ten feet above Boston’s marketplace roof. Early risers first heard the baying of dogs, then the roar.
Newly Discovered Eyewitness Accounts of the War for Independence
IN ALL THE PACK, DAN COAKLEY DESERVED TO BE CALLED
They are all gone now—those vivid, venal characters who for a half century up to World War IIAC moved with insouciant relentlessness across the spotted field of Boston politics.
A few months after the shooting began, the besiegers and the beleaguered of Boston became aware of a new presence on the scene.
When one of the wealthiest men in the Colonies sided with the Patriot cause, he was called a “wretched and plundered tool of the Boston rebels.”
Like Abou Ben Adhem, his name led all the rest.
She was, said Governor Winthrop, an American Jezebel
It would have been no pleasant thing for any defendant to hear John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts colony, declaim the serious charges brought against Anne Hutchinson at her trial in 1637.
An album of pictures from the days when the Kennedys were parvenus and workingmen demonstrated in derbies
That the photographs of G. Frank Radway were ever resurrected from the files of an old Boston newspaper was, in the beginning, simply a matter of luck.
The brisk little Italian immigrant promised you 100 per cent interest in ninety days. Some people actually got it
Seen from the high oval windows of Boston’s City Hall on that sultry June morning in 1920, the line of stiffbrimmed straw hats bobbing along School Street resembled a roiled, wheat-colored stream.
The Navy and contractor Smith accused each other of fraud. The Navy won—until the President took a hand
The way of the reformer is hard. The way ofthat idealistic David who slings his polished stones at the Goliath of military bureaucracy is trebly hard. He needs a firm heart and strong friends. Franklin W.
Its venerable Museum of Fine Arts revives an era of forgotten beauty in a very proper Bohemia
Oscar Wilde, who had something clever to say on almost any subject, visited Boston about 1880, attended a debutante ball, and is supposed to have found the state of feminine beauty so low that he now understood why the city’s artists were reduced to “painting
In late February, 1775, three men in what they thought was Yankee farmers’ dress, “brown cloaths and reddish handkerchiefs round our necks,” boarded the ferry at the foot of Prince Street in Boston, bound for Charlestown, a half mile across the Charles River.
Warren took the lead in creating the Massachusetts Provincial Congress. Refusing to leave Boston like the other radical leaders, he died in the fighting on Breed's Hill in 1775
John Singleton Copley painted Dr. Joseph Warren circa 1765. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Personal charm and affability are traits not commonly associated with revolutionaries, and rarely has an agent of social upheaval been held in such universal esteem by his contemporaries as was Dr. Joseph Warren. He seems to have been a man nearly everyone liked, and his qualities come down to us in those dignified adjectives of the eighteenth century—gentle, noble, generous. So it is difficult to know if it was because of these characteristics or in spite of them that he was one of a handful of provincials most feared by British officialdom.
What was it like to actually be there in April, 1775?
This is how the participants, American and British, remembered it
Mrs. Piper and the Professors
“If I may be allowed the language of the professional logic shop, a universal proposition can be made untrue by a particular instance.
The Literary Lights Were Always Bright at
Everyone wanted to be invited to 148 Charles Street, where Charles Dickens mixed the punch and taught the guests parlor games, John Greenleaf Whittier and Harriet Beecher Stowe vied in telling ghost stories, and Nathaniel Hawthorne paced the bedroom floor one unhappy night in t
Part hero, part rogue, Boston’s Jim Curley triumphed over the Brahmins in his heyday, but became in the end a figure of pity.
Nathaniel was poor and sunk in his solitude; Sophia seemed a hopeless invalid, but a late-flower love gave them at last“a perfect Eden”
Everyone from presidents to swindlers sailed the Sound on “Mammoth Palace Steamers” in the heyday of the sidewheelers
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