250 and Counting

For those of you new to this podcast (or those who haven’t been paying attention), I grew up on Long Island, and have lived or worked pretty much from one end of the map in today’s cover art to the other at one time or another. For instance, my childhood home is just about where the Long Island portion of the map ends at the top right. I did my undergrad work approximately where the &#...

Philip Milledoler was a minister and the fifth president of Rutgers University (Rutgers College, then), but it’s a little more complicated than that. Milledoler took a moribund college and transformed it into the intellectual powerhouse it is today. But how it happened is at the heart of our story. The post September 22, 1775: Philip Milledoler appeared first on 250 and Counting .

In the episode itself I took the time to hammer home the point that many of our historical legends aren’t quite what they seem to be. But also important is the forgotten people of our history as well. Not just the faceless folks who fought and died (or didn’t but remained in obscurity), but the people who were an important part of some events, yet go unnoticed today. And Abel Prescott...

Calling Bernard Romans a “Renaissance Man” wouldn’t be far from the truth, given his various talents and the fact that folks from that era were much more like people from the Renaissance than they are from modern times. Romans was a surveyor, a naturalist, an artist and an author. He was also an entrepreneur, which is what put him on our radar for today. And he was a ship’s...

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...

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 t...

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 pro...

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 th...

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...

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 m...

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, Minnes...

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...

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...

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 hurr...

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&#8217...

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 successf...

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, t...

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 th...

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 af...

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 pictu...

The cover art for today’s episode may be one of the most famous art pieces depicting an event of the American Revolution, and it happened under the Liberty Tree, which is clearly marked here. This event, the tarring and feathering of Loyalist John Malcolm, took place about 18 months earlier and shows Malcolm already tarred and feathered, and now he’s having (also marked) tea poured int...

The HMS Rose was a 20-gun ship of the Royal Navy, built in 1757. When hostilities broke out between the Colonies and the Crown, the Rose was tasked with preventing smuggling off the coast of Connecticut and (especially) Rhode Island. She spent the first few years of the Revolution in Narragansett Bay, in the Long Island Sound, in the Hudson River and down to the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. The Ros...