250 and Counting

We think of “Benedict Arnold” and the word “Traitor” comes immediately to mind. The two are essentially synonymous. Say one, and you’ve said the other. But Benedict Arnold was quite loyal to the Independence cause in the early days of the war. In fact, he was often eager to show what he could do. And why he switched sides is quite complicated and can’t really be answered quickly. There were times...

The Committee of Secret Correspondence is one of those names that sounds like they should be on Double Secret Probation or something. However, when you look at their purpose, the name makes sense. The Committee of Secret Correspondence was formed to seek out support from other nations. They reached out to France, Spain, and a few others to get supplies, food, munitions…pretty much anything they co...

The Minuteman statue in Lexington, Massachusetts is said to represent Captain John Parker, who died on this day. Except Parker wasn’t a minuteman. He also probably didn’t look like the man in the statue, given his age and what other small details we know about him. But as usual, nobody lets the facts get in the way of a good story, so just roll with it, hm? (We’re guessing he probably wasn’t green...

So obviously this Josiah Bartlett isn’t the guy on The West Wing, in part because President Bartlet is fictional. (Okay, maybe entirely because of that.) But he is supposed to be a direct descendant of the Founding Father. Why, and when, the terminal T dropped off was never explained. Anyway, Josiah Bartlett and John Langdon both arrived in Philadelphia from New Hampshire as delegates to the Conti...

Since the early 1700s there have been several Fort Johnsons on James Island in the Charleston Bay. The curious thing is that few people know what happened to each fort as it was destroyed, with the exception of the third one, which was definitely damaged in a storm. But the first two? Who knows. Today’s episode focuses on the second version of the fort, which still has a few vestiges of the old wa...

John Henry Hobart was born on this day in 1775, and he came that close to dying on the same day in 1830, on September 12. We read once that, statistically, men tend to die before “big” dates, e.g. birthdays and major holidays, while women tend to die afterwards. In Claude’s family anyway, it does have a ring of general truth to it. Go figure. Although Hobart was an Episcopalian minister (and later...

Let’s talk state vexillology. Believe it or not, there are people who are very passionate about state flags. (Not me, he said, about to go into a mini-rant.) Most states have a very utilitarian purpose. They kind of lean in, announce themselves, and lean out again. Some flags are weirdly cluttered (New York, New Jersey, West Virginia, Delaware). Some flags are rather boring (Alabama, Minnesota). S...

We mentioned a while back that John Adams had siblings, as did George Washington. This wasn’t one of them, and as far as anyone can tell, it’s more of a cousin-type relationship. William Washington essentially won a bet with his brothers, and his prize was the ability to join the militia in Virginia to fight for independence. From this day in 1775 until 1781 he was engaged in multiple battles agai...

As the winter of 1775 approached, George Washington had to think about the state of the siege of Boston. In short, housing and clothing thousands of men in a New England winter is a very different proposition than doing it in the summer. So Washington convened his War Council to discuss the possibility of breaking the siege by attacking the city from a different direction. Meanwhile up in Canada,...

The riflemen in the Continental Army were a special breed of soldier. They weren’t subject to all the drudge work that most of the other soldiers had to endure. The downside to this is, they knew it and they took advantage of it. So when one rifleman got himself in trouble, word got out and suddenly a relatively small problem turns into a relatively big one. And while George Washington kinda-sorta...

The Independence Hurricane from September 2 is still going strong, and on this day it made landfall again, this time in Newfoundland, Canada. The devastation was immense, and perhaps would have been worse had it happened in modern times (we get it, there are satellites and stuff now). It remains Canada’s worst natural disaster and it’s still in the Top Ten chart for North Atlantic hurricanes. The...

As late as the 1970s, pioneers like Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone had achieved a kind of mythical status, largely because of fictionalized stories created about them by the folks at Disney. Sometimes it gets tough to determine what’s fiction and what isn’t, since they tend to embellish things that may have actually happened for the sake of a story. (Not a knock on Disney, so don’t sue us; that’s...

The Turtle, or the American Turtle as it’s often called, was invented by a man who thought it should be possible to stealthily attach a bomb to a ship and then detonate it shortly thereafter, by approaching the ship from under the waterline. The Turtle was a brilliant idea in concept, if not in execution. There were just too many things that had to go exactly right for the turtle to successfully e...

The Second Continental Congress tried appealing to the Canadian leadership in order to get support for the Independence cause, but they apparently weren’t biting. So George Washington tried a different tack: write to the Canadian people themselves. He reasoned that the folks in charge were mostly wealthy landowners who were doing all right financially under British rule. Maybe, he thought, the ord...

American forces began to move on Fort St. Jean in Canada. Unfortunately they ran into a couple of unexpected obstacles on the way, so they had to adjust their approach. This led to a six-week siege of the fort. The post September 5, 1775: Setback in Canada appeared first on 250 and Counting .

An invasion of Canada seems a little absurd on its face, but when you think about it in the context of the Revolution, it actually starts to make sense. After all, Canada was also a few British colonies in the North American continent, but they were a little more obedient to the whims of Parliament and they had Loyalist leanings. So the Patriots had a choice between bringing them over ideologicall...

Anyone who’s been to Boston in the modern day has a hard time recognizing that the city of Boston was just the segment in the top center of the map. The area called Boston Neck is clearly marked at the bottom left, and wasn’t part of the city. The Continental Army’s line ran about where the blue line ends. (The blue line is modern-day Washington Street.) It was the city having that kind of geograp...

Sometimes when we research these shows we learn stuff that doesn’t have a lot to do with history—not directly—but is interesting nonetheless, and does have some historical impact. Hurricanes would be one of those things. On the east coast of the US, we pretty much take them for granted as a weather phenomenon. They’re definitely scary and destructive, and oftentimes the damage comes after the stor...

Nothing beats the speed of gossip, and apparently the Virginia Gazette on this day had plenty of it to share. A few of the stories were quite serious, relating to events in both Virginia and Massachusetts. They closed out with a local story that had a more humorous edge to it…though it’s likely that the people involved had a hard time seeing the humor in it all. PS Why is there a picture of a fish...

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 Bos...

Despite everything that had already happened, there was still a sizeable chunk of the Second Continental Congress who thought that some form of reconciliation with England was possible. Under their logic, the fact that there had been fighting at Lexington and Concord should have provided King George with ample proof that his policies were unpopular, and maybe he could back off on them a little bit...

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...

Even though he was President of the Second Continental Congress when the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776 (whoops…spoiler alert), it’s entirely possible that John Hancock would be just one more guy who signed the document, except for the fact that he signed his name so large. His signature is so large and so well-known that you can say to someone “Give me your John Hancock” and they...

New Jersey has been pretty quiet since the Lexington and Concord fighting took place. But no more: today they came back…with a vengeance! The post May 23, 1775: New Jersey Gets Into the Act appeared first on 250 and Counting .

Up until now, New Hampshire has been rather quiet when it came to resisting British rule. But today was the day that “Live Free or Die” was more than a motto for their license plates, which had yet to be invented. New Hampshire already had militias, of course, but they had a much broader range of available men from whom to choose. In addition, they organized themselves into a tight fighting force...