250 and Counting

The first week or two of February 1775 could best be described as a series of misunderstandings and communication breakdowns. Any attempts on both sides to reach out with some form of conciliation managed to fail for various reasons. And during all these breakdowns, the situation on the American side of the pond only got worse as time went on, largely because each side thought that the other wasn’...

(Forgive us the jokey headline–sometimes it’s late at night when we post this stuff and we get punchy.) Over the course of a single year—and beginning with this day in 1775—John Cox experienced what any reasonable person would call a “meteoric rise” in his personal and professional fortunes. He started out adjudicating British laws in the Colonies, but moved quickly into assisting with the Colonia...

In today’s episode, guest voice Lorene Childs tells us the story of Mary Peck Butterworth. Mary was a member of the First Families of Rehoboth, Massachusetts, and a very respected member of the society there. But for a few years, and for reasons unknown to modern-day people, Mary enjoyed a rather peculiar hobby, one that perhaps should have made her a more famous person than she is. It wasn’t so m...

John Adams and Daniel Leonard had an interesting relationship. They were great friends at first, until the British started cracking down on the Colonies. Adams chafed under the Crown’s pressure, while Leonard remained loyal. Ultimately it created a rift between the two men which never quite healed, and it broke Adams’ heart. When Leonard began […]

As noted previously, the First Continental Congress composed a Petition to the King asking him for some relief from the Intolerable Acts. The petition arrived in London in mid-December, which turned out to be some bad timing for a number of reasons. Benjamin Franklin was in town for diplomatic purposes, and he composed a letter […]

After the Boston Tea Party, Parliament enacted what they called the Coercive Acts and the Colonies called the Intolerable Acts. The Colonists were neither coerced, nor were the acts tolerated (hence the name). And you know that because we’ve told you this already several times. In October 1774 the Continental Congress composed the “Petition to […]

Hugh Mercer is one of those people who was terribly important to the cause of Liberty during the American Revolution, yet his story goes untold largely because he died early in the effort. But if Mercer hadn’t come to America because he was on the losing side of a battle in Scotland, he wouldn’t have […]

After the Boston Tea Party, the government in Britain enacted what they called the Coercive Acts, or what the Colonists called the Intolerable Acts. (From here, it doesn’t feel like one name was any better-sounding than the other.) Because the Colonists were still hoping to preserve a decent relationship with the Mother Country, the First […]

Before the shooting started, Boston appeared to be the place which gave King George III the most hassles. But to be fair, Boston is the place that the British seemed to provoke more than the other Colonies, so it kind of evened out in the end. When the Intolerable Acts dissolved the existing government in […]

John Rowe was one of those guys who always seemed to be nearby when something happened, but he also manged to let it be known that he was nowhere nearby when that thing happened. For instance, he was the guy who owned the tea that got dumped into Boston Harbor, but he was “sick” that […]

By this time in 1775, tensions between the British and the Colonists in Boston were especially high. The Boston Tea Party resulted in several thousand troops being sent in to restore and maintain order, and Americans being Americans, even before there was an America, nearly every home had plenty of arms and ammunition, or at […]

Benjamin Franklin, like many of our Founding Fathers, was interested in repairing the relationship between the Colonies and England, at least early on. What’s more, he thought that others in similar positions would be of a similar mind, so he was rather dismayed to learn that this wasn’t the case; in fact, when a sheaf […]

It’s Cake and Candles today for James Brown Mason, a doctor in South Carolina and then his home state of Rhode Island. Later on he began a career in politics as one of the last of his political party to take office in Congress. We think Mike had too much fun making this episode.

William Legge was the second Lord Dartmouth and the Secretary of State for the Colonies from 1772 to the end of 1775. He was also step-brother to Lord North, who gets a mention in this episode. While he was a supporter of the constitutional supremacy that Parliament maintained they held over the Colonies, Lord Dartmouth […]

With all the things we know about germ theory and diseases and the importance of vaccinations, it’s kind of a surprise when people take a stance against such things in the face of the hard data. Before the invention of the smallpox vaccine, the disease could have a brutal effect on people who caught it, […]

In this episode you’re going to learn a bunch of things about the general geography of the Bronx, and how some places got their names. It’s actually interesting enough that may have to take some cameras up there and show you just how much the area has changed, and not just in a “what was […]

The Minutemen are among the more romantic images that many people have of the Revolution. Around this time in 1975, the comic strip Doonesbury did a couple of series that were set in the Revolutionary War days. They focused on an ancestor of Zonker’s named Nate Harris, who was a Minuteman. In one strip, Paul […]

Awhile back we talked about a Loyalist who wrote an opinion piece under the pen name “Massachusettensis” (which we may have mocked a little bit but it’s just the Latin word for the Colony/State). His rhetoric angered John Adams to the point where he felt compelled to respond in kind, and he did so using […]

It’s Cake and Candles today for Abraham Henry Schenck, State Assemblyman and then Congressman from New York State. But despite being from New York, and being a member of Congress, during his tenure as State Assemblyman he had something going on back at home. It wasn’t common in New York, but it wasn’t unheard of—nor […]

As we’ve noted a few times, the Colonists in general didn’t want war with Britain; in fact most of them were pretty sure they were going to get wiped out should it come to that. Even our most famous Patriots of the time, such as John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and others, spent enormous […]

Note: we inadvertently posted the January 20 episode yesterday. That episode has been replaced with the correct one, so if you want to hear the real January 19th episode, scroll down to the previous post and listen “again.” Apologies for the error and any confusion. It’s Cake and Candles today for André-Marie Ampère. He was […]

Most people (we think) have this popular notion of American history involving the British imposing taxes and massacreing people in Boston and the Colonists responding with an indignant “Oh, we need to dump some tea and write a Declaration of Independence and take up arms and shoot those red-coated monsters right now!” But if you’ve […]

When the Provincial Congress of Georgia met in the city of Savannah, the natural place for them to meet was a place called Tondee’s Tavern. Georgians were no fans of British activities such as the Intolerable Acts, but they otherwise prospered under British rule and remained largely indifferent to the mother country. However, while the […]

In the early 1770s, the American colonies began feeling the need to defend themselves against British pressures. In some cases the activity was political, but there were plenty of people who saw that there could conceivably be a need to take up arms at some point, especially given the way they interpreted the Intolerable Acts. […]

We suppose there’s something kind of heroic and–dare we say it, romantic–about the idea of a bunch of men dressing up as Native Americans, sneaking onto a boat and throwing 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor. And as an overt act of rebellion, it certainly made a splash (you should excuse the expression). But […]