Boston Massacre Research Articles

Boston's Massacre by Eric Hinderaker

Reviewed by: Boston's Massacre by Eric Hinderaker Emma Stapely (bio) Boston's Massacre. By Eric Hinderaker. (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017. Pp. 358. $29.95 cloth) In standard reckonings of the American Revolutionary period, the "Boston Massacre"—a 1770 confrontation between British troops and Bostonians that left five men dead—often figures as a harbinger of things to come. Eric Hinderaker's Boston's Massacre approaches this event instead as an "irreducible mystery" swirling with contested interpretations in its own time and for long afterwards (p. 1). Examining it through its retrospective legacies, Hinderaker probes the ways in which meaning has been made of the Boston Massacre as the subject first of rivaling, tendentious narratives, and later, of disputed commemorative importance. [End Page 515] Boston's Massacre draws its analytic framework from memory studies, which posits a "three-stage interpretation of the way historical consciousness evolves" from event to narrative to memory (p. 7). The book's ten chapters unfold along this trajectory. Chapter one cuts closest to the event of the Boston Massacre by examining the testimony given in the shootings' immediate aftermath. Hinderaker is quick to observe, however, that while a clear fault line emerges in these accounts between the interests of town and Crown, the testimonies themselves are contradictory, and bring us no nearer to resolving the "factual disputes" they delineate (p. 23). Chapters two through four thus reach back to the Stamp Act crisis (1765) for context, touching on disputes over trade and currency reform (chapter two), attitudes toward crowd action (chapter three), and adjustments to British administration of imperial spaces (chapter four) in the years leading up to Boston's occupation. Chapters five and six cover the period of the occupation, while chapters seven and eight discuss the competing narratives surrounding the Massacre from the shootings to the trials. Finally, chapters nine and ten track the evolving memory of the Boston Massacre over time, touching on its commemoration in Boston during the Revolutionary War, the reclamation of Crispus Attucks by African Americans in the mid-nineteenth century, and the interpolation of the Massacre into histories of police brutality during the post-Civil Rights era. At once a meticulous documentary investigation and a reflection on the messy production of historical meaning, Boston's Massacre marks a refreshing break from the teleological imperatives and ideological explanations that long dominated Revolutionary historiography. In lieu of treating the Boston Massacre as an occasion for unifying narrative, Hinderaker underscores the disparity and contradiction at its heart, exposing how "a retrospective veneer of clarity" has been repeatedly applied to "an episode that was chaotic, poorly understood, and—in important ways—inexplicable" (p. 187). The result is a nuanced analysis which insists that the Boston Massacre has from the outset borne historical significance without being representative for [End Page 516] an emergent pan-colonial political consciousness. Indeed, as his title suggests, Hinderaker argues for the Boston Massacre as a strongly localized event whose influence outside Boston's immediate environs in the 1770s has been overstated. Yet his analysis also shows that Bostonians were neither unanimous nor consistent in their appraisal of the Massacre's import. For Hinderaker, the Massacre's resistance to interpretive consolidation is in many ways its keynote: "All of these controversies illustrate the usefulness of the Boston Massacre as a touchstone of American identity, and also the limits of its power to generate a consensus response" (p. 283). Emma Stapely EMMA STAPELY is an assistant professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. Copyright © 2018 Kentucky Historical Society

“A scene of Villainy acted by a dirty Banditti, as must astonish the Public”: The Creation of the Boston Massacre

In the years before the American Revolution, “A scene of Villainy acted by a dirty Banditti” argues, Boston's Sons of Liberty built their claim to govern their community, at the expense of both Loyalists and laboring Bostonians, by transforming a street fight between soldiers and civilians into the Boston Massacre.

Sacred Scripture, Sacred War: The Bible and the American Revolution James P.Byrd. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Sacred Scripture, Sacred War: The Bible and the American Revolution James P. Byrd. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.In Sacred Scripture, Sacred War, James P. Byrd of Vanderbilt University describes how the Bible was used to make the patriotic case for war (3). Although historians like Harry S. Stout and Gordon S. Wood have noted the connection between religion and the Revolution, Byrd's workmeticulously researched from primary sourcesis one of the first to explain which sections of Scripture were used, how often, why, and to what effect.Byrd also explores other themes that enhanced and framed the ways in which the Bible was used by patriotic preachers. The first theme, republicanism or firm belief in virtue, liberty, and a fear that liberty was always threatened by vice and tyranny, (9) informed the hermeneutics of the patriots time and time again. The second theme, martyrdom, under-girded republican virtue: Liberty came only when people of integrity sacrificed themselves for their nation. This was the essence of (11). The final frame for Byrd is the relationship between martial and spiritual warfare. He writes, Understandably, therefore, the ideas of sacrificial martyrdom and Christian republicanism gained coherence alongside a third conviction, the belief that biblical warfare integrated spirituality and violence, the spiritual struggles of the soul with military struggles on the battlefield (12). Through the interplay of these themes with the textual evidence, Byrd provides a new way of understanding the impact scripture had on the course of the Revolution.After addressing the emergent and framing themes, Byrd underscores how powerful sermons were in colonial and Revolutionary America. He notes, Sermons were published at four times the rate of political pamphlets and were more influential as well (16). Access, geography, and patriotism were also linked: It is no accident that New England was both the most sermonsaturated and the most militant region in colonial North America (20). Throughout this first chapter, Byrd connects martial sermons to specific historical events like the Stamp Act, the Boston Massacre, and the Boston Tea Party. Convincingly, Byrd shows that the mediators between events and their popular, patriotic meaning can be found in the scripturally-soaked rhetoric and minds of America's preachers.Having established the centrality of the sermon, Byrd connects the aforementioned themes and historic events with their oft-utilized, biblical counterparts. …

Insights from the Army's Drawdowns

Abstract: This article provides five insights extracted from discussions concerning the Army's long history of drawdowns. Perhaps the most important take-away is the Army can, and should, use the current drawdown constructively. ********** With the termination of the recent campaign in Iraq and the winnowing of forces in Afghanistan, the US military faces a drawdown of standing force structure and capabilities. The policy debate concerning how best to carry out this force reduction, however, lacks proper historical perspective. Twenty-four civilian historians and military professionals recently offered such a perspective by focusing on previous drawdowns over the span of American history. Beginning with a consideration of the cyclical nature of drawdowns and whether a crisis mentality is warranted in such periods, three major questions emerged. Was the attempt to preserve military effectiveness during drawdowns contradictory to traditional American values? Given the reoccurrence of force reductions in American history, how did the military best preserve combat capabilities? What was the relationship between the regular standing Army and militia/National Guard forces, and how did these reflect broader attitudes towards the military? Insights from the discussions follow. (1) 1. The drawdown of American forces has been a cyclical part of the nation's military experience. Whether they allowed colonial forts to fall into disrepair or furloughed hundreds of thousands of battle-hardened Union troops after the US Civil War, Americans historically have tightened their financial belts at the conclusion of major conflicts. This attitude reflects traditional Anglo-American values dating back to the late-Middle Ages in England. Latent fears of regular armies surfaced before the Revolutionary War with both the Quartering Act and the Boston Massacre. Americans carried these attitudes forward into the twenty-first century. The debate over the US military establishment has never been a purely rational one with biases inherent in the American cultural framework. Concerns over previous drawdowns have not run counter to traditional American values, and have not always been justified even by initial combat effectiveness. For example, the Kennedy/Johnson administrations reversed conventional drawdowns of the Eisenhower era in time to create the most competent US Army ever to engage in the initial battle of any war up to 1965. American forces also met with initial successes in 2001 and 2003 after a decade of drawdowns, paralleling the US experience nearly forty years earlier. However, American forces have not always reconstituted effectively for battle. Significant drawdowns left the Army unprepared for initial campaigns in the early 1790s against Native Americans, the War of 1812, the US Civil War, the Spanish-American War, both World Wars, and the Korean War. Significantly, these wars ended in American military victory, indicating the initial risk of fielding forces based on reduced military infrastructure, though costly in first battles, has often been acceptable in terms of overall strategic costs. Put differently, US foreign policy and national strategy objectives often exceeded military means. There was unanimous agreement among conference participants on this point. 2. Competition between the Regular Army and National Guard (militia) has always been part of the American military discourse. A number of scholars highlighted the historical importance of this competition. This debate is both rational and irrational as it stems from Anglo-Americans' historic preference for virtuous militia over suspect standing armies, while overlooking the sometimes poor initial military performance of militia/National Guard forces. A serving officer's presentation detailed how the relationship between active and reserve components works best in a complementary (but not interchangeable) arrangement. …

Social Studies Content Reading about the American Revolution Enhanced with Graphic Novels

Graphic novels can contribute to effective content area reading on social studies topics such as the American Revolution. This action research study’s purpose was to examine student recall of facts, enjoyment of reading, and interest in the topic when using graphic novels as compared to illustrated nonfiction prose in social studies content area reading. Twenty-two fifth grade students (13 females, 9 males) in a public school in a Midwestern state participated in the study. Half of the students read about the Boston Massacre and Patrick Henry through graphic novels and read about Paul Revere and the Boston Tea Party with illustrated nonfiction texts, with the other half doing the opposite. The mean number of correct ideas recalled by students two weeks after reading two books in the graphic novel condition was 8.6 compared to 7.1 for the nonfiction prose condition with a medium effect size. Students rated their reading enjoyment significantly higher in the graphic novel condition indicating that graphic novels should be employed more often into the school curriculum. Suggestions for integrating graphic novels into the curriculum are provided along with other ways to take action.

The American Revolution Remembered, 1830s to 1850s: Competing Images and Conflicting Narratives

This book examines the contested nature of American revolutionary memory in the two decades before the Civil War through an analysis of the era’s visual images. The author asserts that images of the revolutionary past were vehicles through which American cultural identity was formed and reformed during the antebellum period. Examining pictorial histories, illustrated biographies, and popular painting, Karsten Fitz seeks to understand “how certain images came to possess power within American cultural memory during the mid-nineteenth century” and “assess them within their cultural and historical contexts” (p. 66). The author concludes that the evolving circumstances under which images of the Revolution were produced precluded a static view of the nation’s formative event. Instead, many pictorial narratives competed for public attention. Some grafted women and African Americans onto the story of America’s founding in ways that complicated the national mythology without subverting it. Fitz argues that antebellum illustrators and audiences found the story of David and Goliath a satisfying signifier for interpreting revolutionary events. Drawing heavily on Paul Revere’s famous engraving of the Boston Massacre (1770), lithographers placed the colonists and the British in a binary relationship where a corrupt, worldly British Goliath was defeated by the simple, but morally superior American David. Pictorial representations such as William Croome’s 1844 “Affair at Lexington” depicted minutemen as lacking military knowledge but able to withstand the British Goliath due to the righteousness of their cause. Fitz argues that these virtuous minutemen remained “the most prominent ‘collective’ allegorical personification of the colonists’ struggle with Britain in the decades before the Civil War” (p. 162). Minutemen could also be linked with antebellum ideas about agrarian virtue; so their place in commemorative imagery bolstered an evolving national identity.

The Founders: Can Times Past Meet Times Present?

The Founders: Can Times Past Meet Times Present? Cushing Strout (bio) The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle Over American History by Jill Lepore (Princeton University Press, 2010. 224 pages. $19.95) Jill Lepore is a staff writer for the New Yorker and a Harvard professor of American history. Her combination of scholarship and lively wit is on view in The Whites of Their Eyes. It is an odd title, however, as it derives from Israel Putnam’s alleged command to his troops in the Battle of Bunker Hill. It has nothing to do with the tea-dumping action of 1773. It is even odder that her keenest historical look is not at the tea-party action of 1773 but rather at the current political tea party, “which had very little to do with anything that happened in the 1770s.” For her the actual tea party “wasn’t such a big deal” after all, and was not even called the tea party in print until 1834. In her book the Battle of Bunker Hill and the Boston Massacre are much more influential, going by her measure of how soon and how often the events were commemorated. [End Page xxx] To give up the tea-party movement of 1773, however, to the current right-wing polemicists would be a strategic and historical error. She is not only writing her own historian’s version of the colonial struggle for independence but also is writing a history of the modern use of the tea-party image on behalf of “originalism, evangelicalism, and heritage tourism,” all of which amount to “a variety of fundamentalism.” Structurally this complexity requires her to shuttle back and forth between the eighteenth century and modern times, especially since the bicentennial, when it was clear there was no consensus on how to celebrate it. Lepore sees the writing of history as intrinsically controversial and contentious: “It advances by debate.” But, in a time dominated by what Richard Hofstadter rightly calls a conspiratorial and paranoid style of political rhetoric, there is not the mutual respect and common ground that could make debate either possible or useful. Lepore is more sensitive to literary history than most social historians, but even she does not mention Hawthorne’s great short story “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” (1832), published two years before George R. T. Hewes’s A Retrospect of the Boston Tea-Party, the first time that name was mentioned in print. Hawthorne’s story exemplifies his artistic method of creating a “neutral territory” in which the actual and the imaginary meet and are influenced by each other. Young Robin is swept up in the tea-party action and finds a path to independence, no longer dependent on his Tory uncle, who is tarred and feathered by a mob. Hawthorne’s surreal mode of narration, mixing fact and fiction, has allowed his story to transcend its time and attract much attention from modern critics. The experience of marriage is common to our time and the American Revolution, though the frequency of the divorce rate is not. William Gibson’s docudrama, American Primitive (1972), which stages a public reading of the wartime letters between John and Abigail Adams, marks both the difference and the connection. It is a drama of enforced separation, celebrating their sober civic fidelity to the Revolution and their sustained tender love for each other under stressful circumstances. Lepore is wise to see that history is not just a matter of scholarly analysis: “it has a civic role to play.” Our nation born out of revolution looks for something stable and has a constitution that is meant to hold us together at a more profound level than baseball and Coca-Cola. “No history can easily or always bear that weight,” as she says, feeling it on herself. Historians “mocked the Bicentennial as schlock” but didn’t “offer a story to a nation that needed one.” My colleague Michael Kammen in A Season of Youth (1978) writes extensively about uses of the Revolution by Americans. He demystifies much that has been made out of the Revolution, particularly the common metaphor of a national growing up, yet in the...

The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (review)

Reviewed by: The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory Sika Alaine Dagbovie Tavia Nyong’o. The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009. 230 pp. $22.50. In one scene in Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada (1976), Mammy Barracuda, a slave, and Abraham Lincoln waltz out of a room while Barracuda sings “Hello Abe” to the tune of “Hello, Dolly!” Her white master, Master Swille, and another slave, Uncle Robin, joyfully clap along. The scene, ludicrous and absurd, in some ways speaks to Tavia Nyongo’o’s description of what the “ ‘amalgamation waltz’ is meant to evoke: a momentum that spins the body into and out of the symbolic order, a performance that becomes a mirror in which seeing and being convene, without ever quite converging” (103). While Reed’s pairing satirizes Lincoln’s assumed affinity with blacks, Nyong’o’s discussion of antebellum “amalgamation waltzes” underscores the panicked public discourse about racial hybridity. Nyong’o’s The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory examines responses to the threat of [End Page 317] amalgamation in the U. S., exploring the performativity of race. “The external, intersubjective, and embodied aspects of social remembering,” Nyong’o declares, “are critical to the ways in which I make use of performance and performativity in this study” (13). The first half of Nyong’o’s title draws on the title of a nineteenth-century political cartoon by E. W. Clay, An Amalgamation Waltz. This satirical cartoon attacked abolitionists’ views of black freedom and equality by illustrating the supposed hideousness of black and white interracial couples dancing “cheek-to-cheek, breast-to-breast” (81–82). Nyong’o informs us that the waltz was initially seen as a sensual, transgressive, and threatening dance in its European birthplace; it thus serves as apt metaphor for thinking about racial amalgamation and performance in the U. S. With a mixed-race president, a myriad of mixed-race memoirs and biographies, and ongoing academic inquiry into and public interest in racial mixing, racial crossings, and racial identity, The Amalgamation Waltz is timely and relevant. Nyong’o’s goal is to “both assert and show the performative effects of history rather than simply add to the weight of history’s pedagogy” (7). To this end, the book’s four body chapters chronologically examine four “historical flashpoints”: competing and conflicting representations of Crispus Attucks, black abolitionism in the 1830s, blackface minstrelsy in the 1850s, and present-day artistic responses to race and racism in the antebellum South. Throughout the book, Nyong’o employs the motif of the “circum-Atlantic fold,” a metaphor that concerns both time and space. As he explains, “[b]etween the potential and performance of black freedom . . . there lies the hollow of a fold within which many of our conceptualizations of race, inheritance, and hybridity were formulated” (18). In chapter one, “The Mirror of Liberty: Constituent Power and the American Mongrel,” Nyong’o explores contradictory portrayals of Crispus Attucks, the first martyr of the American Revolution, and demonstrates how the figure of Attucks has been (mis)construed and reproduced in the fold. Examining various illustrations of the Boston Massacre, Nyongo’o discusses how artists of the late eighteenth century (such as Henry Pelham and Paul Revere) and nineteenth-century abolitionist texts (such as the frontispiece of William Cooper Nell’s The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution) portray Attucks as whitewashed, mulatto, or black, according to their political purposes. Nyongo’o highlights how Attucks (and his “blackness”) has been both included and excluded from pictorial representations, revealing a national ambivalence about this revolutionary exemplar. He ends by describing how Attucks was recovered in black collective memory, a move prompted by black abolitionist William Cooper Nell. In chapter two, “In Night’s Eye: Amalgamation, Respectability, and Shame,” Nyong’o asserts that the 1830s present a unique decade because of its “lawless violence” and the “moral status of the scapegoated minority” (72). He reminds his readers that abolitionists saw themselves as morality enforcers. Not all abolitionists were amalgamationists; many abolitionists portrayed the South as a cesspool of cross-racial immorality, pointing to the sexual exploitation of black...

The Boston Massacre: a history with documents

On March 5, 1770, after being harassed for two years during their occupation of Boston, British soldiers finally lost control, firing into a mob of rioting Americans, killing several of them, including Crispus Attucks, a runaway slave and sailor, the first African American patriot killed. The aftermath of this ‘massacre’ led to what was eventually the American Revolution. The importance of the event grew, as it was used for political purposes, to stoke the fires of rebellion in the colonists and to show the British in the most unflattering light. The Boston Massacre gathers together the most important primary documents pertaining to the incident, along with images, anchored together with a succinct yet thorough introduction, to give students of the Revolutionary period access to the events of the massacre as they unfolded. Included are newspaper stories, the official transcript of the trial, letters, and maps of the area, as well as consideration of how the massacre is remembered today.

"Read, Pause, and Reflect!!"

It is a peculiarly split view of human existence in which symbolizations of meaning operate in a closed universe of their own, divorced from the real facts of historical causation.1To foreground the stakes of my comment, I want to propose two modifications of Tip O'Neill's maxim, politics is local. First: All politics is literary. Whatever else it may be, ideology is in part the product of the artful deployment of language; words are necessary, if not always sufficient, structural elements of personal interest, social cohesion, and institutional power. Second: All is politics. There is no artful deployment of language that is not beholden to some sort of ideological configuration. To say literature and political - even in the service of troubling or interrogating the boundaries between the two, as this special issue of the JER does - is to posit difference and conjunction where there is no a priori separation. The work of thinking through the consequences of this continuity exceeds disciplinary specificity: a close analysis of texts is not only the trademark gesture of the scholar, as Sandra Gustafson puts it in her introduction to this issue, but also a necessary condition of doing history.To make this case in miniature, I want to look at a set of related moments from the presidential election of 1828, in which rhetorical critiques and theorizations of writing become a way of forging (and understanding what it means to forge) political or ideological relationships. First, though, the interested parties: on the one hand, President John Quincy - diplomat, negotiator, crafter of treaties, and eloquent pleader of cases; a man of words. On the other, General Andrew - Old Hickory, the mute cudgel, a conqueror of territories and a slayer of enemies; a man of action. Cast in the popular idiom as a contest between Adams who can write and Jackson who can fight, electioneering in 1828 was not only deeply in and of itself but often took the form of what we might think of as criticism.2Consider, for example, the famous anti-Jackson Coffin Handbill, an anonymously compiled and printed broadside that circulated widely in 1828. Enormous (58 X 42 cm), salacious, vividly illustrated, and textually complex, the object is an artistic wonder: It includes heavy black borders, 18 coffins (representing white men killed by in his capacities as general, duelist, and aggrieved private citizen), a vivid account (including an engraving) of stabbing a man in the back with sword-cane, and a poem about Jackson's cruel treatment of six unwitting army deserters. Each of these elements would be worth pursuing in a traditionally literary way: The borders and coffins, reminiscent of both an eighteenth-century elegy tradition and of the broadsides commemorating the Boston Massacre of 1770, trade on print-culture commonplaces to align support for with public mourning and with antiAmerican violence. The depiction of the stabbing has analogues in the sensational fiction of the time (particularly in the emergent genre of the temperance narrative). The poem is a poem, writing Jackson's refusal to pardon Army deserters into a ballad tradition and elevating his crimes to folk-legendary status. In other words, as political hackery goes, this object is remarkably canny about convention and textual form; its points about Jackson's infamy emerge not only from the gruesome facts it presents but also from the manner in which it presents them. Jackson's political and personal transgressions are not merely newsworthy, they are epical: suitable for the artist's burin, the balladeer's voice, the tragedian's pen. They deserve the theoretical immortality of art.3But there is another layer to the broadside's interest in politics. In between the coffins- -just below and to the left of the image of running through his unarmed counterpart - there is an account of Jackson's participation in the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in east-central Alabama, March 27, 1814. …

From Forgotten Founder to Indispensable Icon: Crispus Attucks, Black Citizenship, and Collective Memory, 1770–1865

This study illustrates and assesses the historical amnesia surrounding Crispus Attucks and his role in the American Revolution between his death at the 1770 Boston Massacre and the 1850s, when he first became widely used as a symbol of African American patriotism and citizenship. Studies of collective memory and the role it plays in shaping historical understanding, developing commemorative traditions, defining culture heroes, and constructing group or national identity, have been expanding in recent decades, including significant work related to the Revolutionary era and African American history. In particular, there are growing bodies of work on blacks’ uses of public commemoration and on the development of a pantheon of race heroes to advance both race pride and African Americans’ legitimate claims to American citizenship. Scholarship on figures such as Richard Allen, Sojourner Truth, Nat Turner, and others suggests the ways in which black Americans have constructed heroic traditions in ways that fostered both racial and American identities. After the 1850s, black activists presented Crispus Attucks as a “black Founding Father”—not merely an important race hero, but a legitimate national hero. But this seminal figure in African Americans’ quest to define their legitimate place in United States history and culture was virtually ignored by both blacks and whites in the early republic. Understanding the process of Attucks’s rediscovery after the 1830s contributes not only to our understanding of African American history, but also to our understanding of how collective memory is constructed and appropriated to serve particular political agendas.

Cultural Formations in Colonial North America and the Early National United States

Cultural Formations in Colonial North America and the Early National United States Jeffrey H. Richards Jason Shaffer , Performing Patriotism: National Identity in the Colonial and Revolutionary American Theater (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). Pp. 230.$45.00. Cynthia A. Kierner , The Contrast: Manners, Morals, and Authority in the Early American Republic (New York: New York University Press, 2007). Pp. x, 145. $60.00. Catherine O'Donnell Kaplan , Men of Letters in the Early Republic: Cultivating Forums of Citizenship (Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture/University of North Carolina Press, 2008). Pp. xiv, 239. $59.95. Bryan Waterman , Republic of Intellect: The Friendly Club of New York City and the Making of American Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007). Pp. xv, 318. $55.00. The establishment of an intellectual and artistic culture in the British colonies of North America and postwar new republic of the United States has been the subject, in constituent parts, of a number of studies in the last decade, the books under review among them. Scholars have long found the American Revolution a rich source of historical interest; more recently, the 1790s have drawn the attention of cultural historians. Together, the period from 1750 to 1800 constitutes not merely the founding of the British American polity but also a period of cultural experimentation that laid the grounds for future cultural developments. But in many ways, these periods, for the past and recent investigation, still remain not fully known. And if none of the books being considered here shocks with surprising revelations, each in its own way offers up information and insights into sometimes familiar, sometimes obscure situations and personages that in the accumulation urge scholars of the American eighteenth century to explain in even greater detail what this confusing, radical, reactionary, sanguinary, exhilarating half-century was truly about. [End Page 462] One difficulty facing all scholars of the period is determining what constitutes an American culture. Neither the Stamp Act riots, nor the Boston Massacre, the Declaration of Independence, nor even the inauguration of George Washington as the first president under the new constitution specifically delimits the beginning of an intellectual and artistic heritage that can be claimed to be specifically American. The long shadow of colonialism extended well past these signpost events, past Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, Edwin Forrest and Margaret Fuller, at least into the 1860s, when an aging Nathaniel Hawthorne struggled with three incomplete novels about Americans recovering an English past, and thus, a vestigial British identity. Nevertheless, writers, artists, actors, and orators on both sides of the Atlantic recognized that the North American colonies were not Great Britain, as much as some colonials tried to emulate English squires and at certain moments declared the differences to be stark and clear. The truth is, however, that colonials-turned-citizens of the United States often wanted it both ways, an identity that declared the specificity of residence in the New World within a broader framework of transatlantic circulation and exchange. Americanness could be performed, it seemed, as a way of trying out certain attitudes and behaviors—republican simplicity and restraint, for instance—and as a playacting upon the theater of the world, where individuals and nations postured and gestured for places on the macrocosmic stage before global audiences. That consciousness of acting before the eyes of the world had a long history in colonial North America, but as Jason Shaffer reiterates in his fine new study, Performing Patriotism, it became especially acute during the long Revolutionary period when professional theater itself found a place in the colonial landscape. For Shaffer, the linkage of the political and theatrical generates expression of a rising American nationalism within the context of an imported cultural frame. As he points out, the "appropriations of texts, both theatrical and polemical, helped to generate an American nationalism that used British culture against itself, invoking both the cultural affinity between the two nations and their irreconcilable political differences" (7). In Shaffer's view, a touchstone play like Joseph Addison's Cato, long known as a Washington favorite, carries with it complex associations and registers of political position when transplanted to a New World setting and...

The Lawyer, the Judge, the Historian: Shaping the Meaning of the Boston Massacre, American Revolution, and Popular Opinion from 1770 to the Present Day

Both the Kevelson Seminar topic, ‘Lawyers as Makers of Meaning,’ and the appearance of a highly-publicized television series in the United States dedicated to the life of President John Adams (1735–1826) invite inquiry into Adams’ role as a lawyer who shaped the meaning of the American Revolution (and his role in bringing it about). Three trials from Adams’ early legal career illustrate that he presented both himself and fellow resistance leader James Otis, Jr., as heroic loners struggling for the rights of Americans against British injustice. Although he did not call it that, in 1970 lawyer and future Massachusetts Superior Court Justice Hiller Zobel, in his book The Boston Massacre, undertook what we would consider a semiotic approach that investigated the relevant codes and contexts—both the legal complexities and the audiences, other lawyers, judges, and posterity about which Adams spoke, simplifying and minimizing their roles as he maximized his own (and Otis’s). Zobel’s own relationship with Adams’ legal career appeared in his own tenure on the bench, especially in the famous ‘Nanny’ (discussed by Denis Brion, in this issue) case in which he explicitly presented the Boston Massacre Trials as a relevant precedent. Despite Adams’ willingness to subordinate his clients’ welfare to the patriot cause early in his career, it can be argued that HBO television and historian David McCullough, by presenting him to the public only flawed by his outspoken, stubborn honesty, have nevertheless performed a public service. Their version of Adams offers Americans in the twenty-first century an alternative role model to the dishonest, ill-informed politicians who use public opinion polls rather than political theory, moral philosophy, and historical knowledge as the basis of their decisions.

Dr. Joseph Warren: Leader in Medicine, Politics, and Revolution

Dr. Joseph Warren: Leader in Medicine, Politics, and Revolution

The Encyclopedia of the age of political revolutions and new ideologies, 1760-1815

By giving rise to new ideologies that in time transformed the political structure of much of the world, the American and French Revolutions stand as two of the most important political events in global history. The American establishment of a Republican government, and the gradual expansion of democracy that ensued, altered traditional political and social thought, thus shaping the later French Revolution and creating the core ethic of later American political values. The Enlightenment ideals of the French Revolution, as later spread by the armies of Napoleon, dissolved most traditional European notions of political authority. This encyclopedia offers current, detailed information on the people, events, movements, and ideas that defined the revolutions in France and America, as well as in other parts of the world during the late eighteenth-century Age of Revolutions. Besides numerous entries on various countries of Europe whose histories were affected by the French Revolution, such as Austria, Belgium, Germany, Poland, and Russia, the many entries covering the people, events, groups, and ideologies of Revolutionary and Napoleonic France include the following: Civil Constitution of the Clergy, Georges Jacques Danton, The Directory, Guillotine, Josephine, Empress of France, Law of Suspects, The Mountain, Prairial Insurrection, Tennis Court Oath, White Terror. Besides various entries covering American colonies/states, such as Maryland, New Jersey, North Carolina, and Virginia, the numerous entries covering the figures, events, and ideologies of the American Revolution and Early Federal Period of the United States include the following: Abigail Adams, Boston Massacre, Constitutional Convention, William Franklin, Lexington and Concord, Actions at Loyalists, Massachusetts Government Act, Edmund Randolph, Signers of the Declaration of Independence. Finally, the encyclopedia offers various entries covering important revolutionary figures and movements that were active in other parts of the world during the period 1760-1815, including the following: Simon Bolivar, Dutch Revolutions, Haitian Revolution, Hispaniola, Latin American Revolutions, Mexican Revolution, Pugachev Rebellion, Toussaint l'Ouverture. Besides over 450 clearly written and highly informative entries, the encyclopedia also includes primary documents, a chronology, an extensive introductory essay, a bibliography, a guide to related topics, and a series of useful maps.

The Boston Massacre Trials: An Account

Although it has been over two centuries since the moonlit March night in 1770 when British soldiers killed five Bostonians on King Street, people still debate responsibility for the Boston Massacre. Does the blame rest with the crowd of Bostonians who hurled insults, snowballs, oysters shells, and other objects at the soldiers, or does the blame rest with an overreacting military that violated laws of the colony that prohibited firing at civilians? Whatever side one takes in the debate, all can agree that the Boston Massacre stands as a significant landmark on the road to the American Revolution.

Samuel Adams: father of the American Revolution

Acknowledgments Timeline of the Life of Samuel Adams Who Is Who in Samuel Adams: Father of the American Revolution Introduction The Education of a Radical Civil Disobedience A Bundle of Sticks The True Sentiments of America All the King's Men Persecution The Boston Massacre Standing Alone The Fuse of a Revolution Portents of War Revolution Independence The Trials of War A Constitution Twilight Epilogue: Patriarch of Liberty Notes Bibliography Index

Representing Revolution in Black History: Consensus and Resistance in Nineteenth Century African American Accounts of the Boston Massacre

Representing Revolution in Black History: Consensus and Resistance in Nineteenth Century African American Accounts of the Boston Massacre

Representing Revolution in Black History: Consensus and Resistance in Nineteenth Century African American Accounts of the Boston Massacre

Representing Revolution in Black History: Consensus and Resistance in Nineteenth Century African American Accounts of the Boston Massacre

After the Siege: A Social History of Boston, 1775-1800 (review)

After the Siege: Social History of Boston, 1775-1800. By Jacqueline Barbara Carr. (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 2004. Pp. xv, 318. Illustrations, maps. Cloth, $40.00.)The town of Boston played a prominent role in the early stages of the American Revolution, providing the setting for the Stamp Act riots, the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, the Boston Port Act. and the occupation by British troops followed by their expulsion. But for the period after March 1776, historians invariably turn either to more specific topics or to discussions of other regions that exclude Boston's unique urban experience. Consequently, Jacqueline Carr's After the Siege takes on a particular significance. Her examination of Boston's social history during and after the war helps to fill an important gap in our understanding not only of Boston, but of how revolutionary the Revolution was for those living in that community.On the eve of the American Revolution, Boston had a population of approximately 15,000; by 1800 that number had increased to only 25,000. intervening twenty-five years had been profoundly disruptive ones in which Boston's civilian residents numbered only 3,000 during the British occupation in 1775-1776. ensuing years of war and economic depression also took a toll on the devastated town. As late as 1780, Boston teetered on the edge of complete collapse (7), according to Carr, but then, in the postwar era, the community recovered its population and prosperity with increasing rapidity and confidence. Carr traces the turbulent twenty-five-year transformation of Boston by analyzing the Tax-Taking Books compiled by local assessors for each of Boston's twelve wards. This mine of largely untapped data, along with newspapers and town, probate, and church records, enables her to trace patterns of migration, occupation, property ownership, and residence for individuals as well for the aggregate population, while concentrating especially on the middling and lower classes.After describing the physical destruction and chaos left behind by the departing British troops and Loyalists, Carr examines Boston's renaissance from the standpoint of four themes. In The Character of the Town, she provides a topographical/demographic overview reminiscent of the second edition of Walter Whitehill's Boston: Topographical History (1968). series of maps helps readers to understand Boston's physical evolution, although in several instances they are poorly placed and so small as to be difficult to read. In A Well-Ordered Town, Carr describes the restoration of civilian government among Boston's diverse and highly mobile war-time population. Bostonians perpetuated their traditional town meeting frame of government, more suitable for a rural village than an urban metropolis struggling to cope with problems of poverty, sanitation, disease, fire protection, the regulation of commercial activity, and the restoration of public education.How men and women made a living in Boston is Carr's third theme. Despite the destruction and dislocations brought about by enemy occupation, war, and postwar depression, the increase in Boston's population created an expanding domestic market that in turn stimulated employment in laboring, house construction, shop keeping, and ship building with its associated skills. …