250 and Counting

Tag: Massachusetts History

  • June 17, 1775: The Battle at Bunker Hill

    Cover art for June 17, 1775: The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker's Hill (detail) by John Trumbull, 1786.

    In the long run, the Battle at Bunker Hill Breed’s Hill was a tactical win for the British, but they incurred heavy losses and it took three tries to get that win.

    So why is it one of the battles that so many Americans seem to remember all these years later?

    We’re speculating here, but it’s possible that, between this battle and the ones at Lexington and Concord, the Colonial forces realized that this was a war that they could actually win: it wasn’t crazy at all to fight the British army. It almost didn’t matter that we didn’t win this one; the colonial militiamen could stand up against the British and force them to work much harder for their victories.

    There’s a scene in The Godfather, Part II in which Michael describes an incident he’d seen earlier in the day. He says he saw some Cuban rebels being rounded up by the soldiers, and one of them, rather than being taken prisoner, detontated a grenade on his person, taking a Captain of the Guard with him. From that he concluded that because the rebels weren’t getting paid to fight, they can actually win.

    That’s pretty much what happened here.

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  • June 15, 1775: The Original G-Man

    Cover art for June 15, 1775: Portrait of George Washington in 1775 by Samuel King

    Jeez, I gotta stop writing these titles late at night.

    Sometimes the history books make it sound like some people just appeared out of nowhere, but they did have pasts. George Washington would be a good example.

    Washington has been nearly invisible since this show started on January 1, but that doesn’t mean that the Congress hollered “Anyone wanna be a general?” and he stepped up first. In fact, he was a delegate to the First Continental Congress in 1774, and for some time he’d been a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses, often simultaneously with the Congress thing. And he did have a commendable military background dating back to the French and Indian War, so appointing him the Commander of Colonial forces wasn’t part of someone’s crazy scheme: they thought he could really do it.

    And do it, he did.

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  • June 13, 1775: Colonists Catch Wise…Again

    Cover art for June 13, 1775: 1850 map of the Bunker Hill and Breed's Hill areas. Boston is in the lower right corner.

    It wasn't even close to being the first time, but this was an important "get": the colonist forces learned that troops were coming to capture Charlestown and Dorchester in an effort to break the siege. They got lucky, it all led to some ugliness and eventually both sides could call it a win, and both sides could call it a loss.

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  • May 28, 1775: The Battle of Chelsea Creek, pt.2

    Cover art for May 28, 1775: The Burning of the Gaspee by Charles De Wolf Brownell

    Some of what you’ll be hearing today will have overlap with yesterday’s episode, but we all have shorter memories, we read in an article…uh, somewhere.

    But in the long run, that’s okay, because context is everything, and it’s important to understand what a big deal this particular incident was against the bigger picture.

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  • May 27, 1775: The Battle of Chelsea Creek, pt.1

    Cover art for May 27, 1775: Portrait of Colonel John Stark, artist unknown.

    Not to be confused with Chelsea of Battle Creek, who has worked for a famous cereal company for 28 years. (We may have made that up.)

    Lexington and Concord was the first “official” battle of the American Revolution, but at best it was a draw: Patriots took a bunch of losses, soldier-wise, but the British were forced to retreat under fire the entire time, and they wound up mostly sequestered in Boston when the dust settled.

    This could be considered the next chapter in that story, in that the Siege of Boston led directly to the events of this day, and the next, in 1775. Claude is setting up the story, and Mike will be finishing it off tomorrow. Enjoy!

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  • May 25, 1775: Reinforcements Arrive From Britain

    Cover art for May 25, 1775: Map of Boston showing rebel placements, drawn by Sir Thomas Hyde in 1775 (detail). From the Library of Congress website.

    Sometimes it’s kind of tough to bring an image to life through an audio podcast, but we thought it was important enough that you needed to see it somehow.

    It’s oftentimes hard for us to understand just how wild the Thirteen Colonies were back in the day. In 1775, New York City was roughly a square mile of the southern tip of Manhattan. Where today’s Wall Street is was literally a wall, keeping out anything to the north. That’s another 13 miles of island (roughly) to the north which might have some Europeans living there, but not many. So, to that end…

    This is a map of modern-day Boston, with a neighborhood breakdown on it, per the city’s Office of Neighborhood Services:

    And this is the full map from the cover artwork. They’re slightly rotated to one another (more likely, the 1775 map is pointed toward magnetic north than true north), but the heart of Boston, at center left, is essentially the tip of today’s South Boston. On the map above, the siege line is about where the word “South” is printed.

    So it was pretty easy to set up a line of defense to keep the city isolated, especially since the city was surrounded by water on three sides. Supplies and people could get in and out by water, but the city itself was still cut off for anyone approaching by land.

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  • May 14, 1775: Don’t Mess With Fairhaven

    Cover art for May 14, 1775: HMS Falcon, accompanied by a smaller ship. Painting by William Nowland Van Powell.

    The Thirteen Colonies didn’t have a lot in the way of a navy to help them with their battles, especially not against perhaps the biggest and best navy ever up until then.

    What they did have was people who were willing to act in lieu of a navy. Some of them did it out of sheer patriotism, and others were a little more mercenary about it. Specifically, privateers.

    Now, “privateers” sounds a little like “pirates” and people often use the words interchangeably. You should stop being friends with those people. Privateers are a specific breed of sailor. They’re government-sanctioned to act as a kind of ad-hoc navy, authorized to take action in times of war. Typically, their job was to disrupt merchant vessels (hence the confusion with pirates).

    It wasn’t long after the Revolution began that Fairhaven, Massachusetts, became a place known for privateer activity.

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    Extra credit activity: check out the West Wing, Season 4, Episode 18. You’ll learn more about privateers, and as a bonus, you’ll never think of Francis Scott Key the same way ever again.

  • May 3, 1775: You Can’t Keep a Good Spy Down

    Cover art for May 3, 1775: detail of the Massachusetts Spy from that day.

    More often than not, items that appear in the Bill of Rights derive directly from actions that the British took at one time or another in the past. Ban guns, will you? Here’s a nice Second Amendment. Ban free speech? Here’s your First Amendment.

    And so on.

    Today’s edition could be considered a Part Two to the events of April 16, when the Massachusetts Spy had to pack up shop and hightail it out of Boston down the road some forth miles to Worcester specifically so it could keep publishing. On this day, the Spy sprang back to life.

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  • May 2, 1775: Meet Rachel Revere

    Cover art for May 2, 1775: portrait of Rachel Walker Revere by Gilbert Stuart, 1812.

    Rachel Walker Revere was Paul Revere’s second wife. When he married her, he’d only been a widower for a few months, so clearly she made a big impression on him, especially since they remained together until her death in 1813 (one year after the portrait in today’s artwork was painted), and he didn’t remarry after that.

    Rachel was a very supportive wife to Paul, by most accounts, but she was also willing to give him grief when he deserved it, as you’ll learn in today’s episode.

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  • April 26, 1775: Josiah Quincy II Dies at Sea

    Cover art for April 26, 1775: posthumous portrait of Josiah Quincy II by Gilbert Stuart, c. 1825

    Josiah Quincy—who we’ve talked about before; remember that portrait?—would have been one of the more prominent men we speak of when we use venerated tones about the Founding Fathers, had it not been for the fact that he died just as the war was getting started.

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