250 and Counting

While preparing to depart Boston for New York, George Washington appointed Nathaniel Greene to run things for awhile until everything was back in order. Fortunately for both Greene and Washington, matters straightened out rather quickly, because Greene was called to join Washington just a few weeks later. Nathaniel Greene was tasked with fortifying Brooklyn while Washington prepared to defend Manh...

Philemon Beecher is an unusual name (said the guy named Claude Call, sigh ), but that’s on us for not recognizing it as a name from the Bible. Philemon was a man to whom the apostle Paul wrote while in prison. He was in prison more than once, but it’s not entirely clear which stretch Paul was doing when he wrote it. Philemon was a leader in the Colossian Church, and Paul’s letter...

In the aftermath of the siege of Boston, it was incumbent upon George Washington and his men to re-enter the city and take stock of its condition. Mike brings up Artemas Ward in today’s episode, and I’m pretty sure that was the first time his name has come up in the course of this podcast. Ward was a major general during the Revolutionary War, among others, and an effective political l...

It’s been 333 days since Lexington and Concord, when the British were forced to retreat to Boston and were bottled up there by Colonial forces. It’s been a week since the British said “enough” and decided to effect their departure from the city as soon as the weather cooperated. But today, the day finally came. It took about five hours to launch over a hundred ships, carryi...

As we noted back in July , a day of prayer, humiliation and fasting wasn’t new to the Continental Congress. (Go back to that episode’s show notes to see my explanation of the word “humiliation” in this context.) And, as Mike notes in the episode, it wasn’t even close to the last for this Congress. That’s neither good nor bad; it probably gave everyone the opport...

Georgia delegates to the Second Continental Congress numbered exactly one until around this time. That would be Dr. Lyman Hall, who didn’t believe it was ethical for him to represent the entire colony when he knew that feelings were largely divided back home. Then came the Battle of the Rice Boats, on March 2 and 3. After that, it seems, things moved very quickly for Georgians: the Royal Gov...

There’s a ninth season episode of The Simpsons called “Sideshow Bob’s Last Gleaming” in which Bart’s nemesis, Sideshow Bob, steals a nuclear bomb and threatens to detonate it unless the town disables all of its television broadcasts. He delivers this ultimatum via a Jumbotron screen. Before ending the transmission, he says, “By the way, I’m aware of the ir...

First: let me apologize for the slight change in sound quality for today’s episode. I’m not in my usual recording space and I’m not especially happy with the equipment I brought. At worst you’ll have to put up with it just one more time. Next: George Washington was a gentleman through and through, so the fact that his general orders sometimes focused on the Continental sold...

Of course it’s coincidental, but it’s kind of cool that we’re able to bring you this episode during Women’s History Month and the same week as International Women’s Day. Believe it or not, Mike and I have struggled with the fact that there’s very little representation of anyone from this era who isn’t a white male. We’ve managed to touch on a few wom...

The focus today up in Cambridge, while waiting for the British to hightail it out of Boston, was getting the men ready to move to New York, and putting together Washington’s personal guard. Washington didn’t really need a personal guard in Cambridge, at least not much of one, because he was in the driver’s seat while he was there. The British were bottled up, and he was the stopp...

For a guy who’s technically on the wrong side of history, Crean Brush was a pretty interesting character. Mike mentions in the episode that Brush was jailed for some time during the Revolution, but time didn’t allow him to tell you how Brush managed to get out of jail. I’m not going to spoil it, but the truly fascinating story can be found in this article by Eric Weiser . This ar...

The occupation of Dorchester Heights, just across the river from Boston, was perhaps the final step that George Washington needed to end the siege that had gone on for nearly a year. Of course, it wasn’t just occupying Dorchester Heights; Washington could have pretty much done that at any time. It was occupying them with a terrifying speed, thanks to Rufus Putnam (the guy in today’s co...

When Samuel Tweedy moved from Dutchess County, NY to Danbury, CT, it was a fortuitous time to do something like that. Danbury was undergoing an economic expansion as part of a post-war boom, which gave him extra opportunities to gain access to trade and manufacturing that he never would have seen back in New York, which was a largely agrarian economy at the time. Tweedy’s marriage to Ann Bur...

Congress had a lot of military-related activities to tend to, and one of them was Isaac Melchior. (If you look him up you’ll see an alternate spelling of him as “Melcher.” We’re sticking with “Melchior” because we saw that first.) March 7 was a Thursday, so the Congress was figuring out what do do about Melchior’s apparent insubordination the previous Satu...

The Pennsylvania State Rifle Regiment, also known as Miles’ Regiment, also known as the Pennsylvania 13th Regiment first came about when the Pennsylvania State Battalion of Musketry merged with Miles’ Reigment. We know it’s confusing, largely because there were so many names involved and that’s not even where the names ended. Samuel Miles was their commander when they were...

So here’s a fun story about Charles Carroll. As I’ve mentioned many times before, lots and lots of place names in Baltimore have strong historical connections and Charles Carroll is no exception. There is, of course, a Carroll Street, which starts in the southeast neighborhood of Morrell Park. It doesn’t go quite through that neighborhood though; it gets broken up by a couple of...

Colonel Henry Knox took about ten weeks to get from Ticonderoga to Cambridge rather than the two he anticipated. But his arrival meant the siege’s end in Boston would come soon. Knox had brought something like 60 tons worth of material overland using hand-built sledges and carts drawn by oxen. The last leg of the trip is still a mystery, because Knox’ diary ends about two weeks early....

The raid on New Providence is probably one of those situations where we couldn’t really represent everything that was going on on this particular island, because there were a lot of moving parts. We especially overlooked the part at the end. Two of the ships went to St. Augustine, laden down mostly with gunpowder. Of the others, they headed further north, where they encountered the HMS Hawk...

Oh, that Royal Governor Josiah Martin. He might be defiant, he might be delusional. He might be in denial. What he was not, apparently, was cognizant of the effect that the Battle of Moore’s Creek Bridge had on Loyalist morale. Or, perhaps he did. At any rate, his order to raise the British flag anywhere a flag could be raised was more performative than anything else. This was Martin’s...

We bumped into a little dilemma when putting together this episode. Specifically, what do we do when 1776 doesn’t match up with 2026? As it turns out, 1776 was a leap year, so that year had a February 29, whereas 2026 does not. So we decided to do what most Leap Babies seem to do: mark the day on March 1. To that end, today marks two events: first, we take a look at an arrangement that Franc...

Phyllis Wheatley was an 18th century poet who was born in West Africa and sold into slavery as a small child, living with the Wheatley Family in Boston. Phyllis wrote a book of poems which was published in 1773, after which she was emancipated. This makes her the first African-American author of a published book of poetry. Phillis Wheatley married a grocer named John Peters around this same time....

As Revolutionary battles go, the Battle of Moore’s Creek Bridge was relatively minor. It didn’t last very long, there weren’t a ton of losses on either side (though definitely more on the Loyalist side), and it led to the capture of hundreds of Loyalists. However, it changed the way the British viewed the Carolinas through the rest of the war. Overall, the perception was that the...

Innis Green served as a Jacksonian Democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives during the 20th (1827–1829) and 21st (1829–1831) Congresses, essentially holding the party’s populist line. But he did deviate from party alignment on May 26, 1830, when Green voted nay on H.R. 287, the Indian Removal Act. Despite this, the bill passed narrowly, 102-97. This stance positioned him among Pennsylva...

I mention in today’s episode that William Augustine Washington lived on a Virginia plantation he’d inherited, and that his first house burned down. The second house he moved to, on the same property but a mile away (yow!), was called Blenheim. Washington used some of the bricks from the original house to add on to the Blenheim house, but he also used a bunch of them to start on a house...

A Coruña is a coastal city in northeastern Spain that’s often stylized as La Coruña, as Mike says in this episode. Its location makes it an ideal port for trade with other nations, and the American Colonies was no exception. Now, France gets a lot of attention for the assistance they gave us during the Revolution, but Spain was at least as helpful as France was. They were just quieter about...