250 and Counting

Mike has already mentioned the location of the historical marker in today’s art. It’s tough to read even when you’re standing there, so here’s the text: At or near this place ever since known as “Liberty Point” was promulgated in June 1775, by patriots of the Cape Fear A Declaration of Independence of the British Crown. This was an extremely historic neighborhood, should yo...

Sometimes when you’re watching a movie or listening to music, you find yourself in the awkward position of separating the artist from the work, because it turns out that the artist has some shady stuff going on in the past, or even in the present. But the song/movie/book is just so good that you need to temporarily overlook that. Such is the case, we think, with Vardry Echols McBee, an entre...

It’s Cake and Candles today for a future State Representative of a future state. Orsamus Cook Merrill was born in Connecticut but moved to Vermont coincidentally the same year that the Vermont Republic was admitted to the Union as our fourteenth state. He spent the rest of his life in the Bennington area, working in jobs as diverse as newspaper editor or publisher, postmaster, attorney and E...

In the long run, the Battle at Bunker Hill Breed’s Hill was a tactical win for the British, but they incurred heavy losses and it took three tries to get that win. So why is it one of the battles that so many Americans seem to remember all these years later? We’re speculating here, but it’s possible that, between this battle and the ones at Lexington and Concord, the Colonial for...

Yesterday, George Washington was unanimously elected Commander in Chief of the Continental Army. Today he officially accepted the position. He won’t take actually begin until early July (we’ll get to that episode in a few weeks), but take a look at this image here. He’s already in the blue coat, and his hair is whiter than it was in yesterday’s art. The truth about his hair...

Jeez, I gotta stop writing these titles late at night. Sometimes the history books make it sound like some people just appeared out of nowhere, but they did have pasts. George Washington would be a good example. Washington has been nearly invisible since this show started on January 1, but that doesn’t mean that the Congress hollered “Anyone wanna be a general?” and he stepped up...

No tongue-in-cheek for today. No weird jokes. No political stances. Just thanks for giving us America, and then helping us keep it. In today’s episode, Mike takes you back to the first day. The post June 14, 1775: Cake and Candles for the US Army appeared first on 250 and Counting .

I t wasn't even close to being the first time, but this was an important "get": the colonist forces learned that troops were coming to capture Charlestown and Dorchester in an effort to break the siege. They got lucky, it all led to some ugliness and eventually both sides could call it a win, and both sides could call it a loss. The post June 13, 1775: Colonists Catch Wise…Again appeared first on...

The folks in America wanted to ensure that the folks in Canada knew just how bad the conditions were, but the problem was that most of the regular inhabitants of Canada spoke French, so when the Continental Congress created documents meant to sway the Canadians to our side of the loyalty fence, they were written in French. But the problem was, they couldn’t use these documents as evidence fo...

Full Disclosure: I have no idea whether I pronounced “Machias” correctly. We’ll all have to live with that one, I suppose. The Battle of Machias was not exactly one of epic proportions. It was a couple of boats chasing after a couple of other boats, and one boat got away but the other one managed to damage itself and was ultimately boarded. So why is it significant? Well. Not onl...

In the wake of Lexington and Concord, some places didn’t wait to start assembling troops to fight off the British. Most of them were in that part of the Colonies, though. Enter the Berkeley County Riflemen, from a section of Virginia that is now West Virginia. George Washington put out the word that soldiers were needed, and about a hundred men from Martinsburg stepped up, even going so far...

We’ve spent all our time on the East Coast; let’s take a side quest to the West Coast to see what the Spanish are up to. We have two main players here: Bruno de Heceta, after whom at least two locations on the West Coast are named (and they’re pronounced differently, go figure), and Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra. They sailed together, each in charge of a ship, and made it...

In the aftermath of the Gunpowder Incident, Lord Dunmore decided that the better part of valor involved getting out of town before the locals could get a good lynch mob together, and he left Virginia on the HMS Fowey . Here’s the interesting part: the Fowey which Dunmore boarded was not the first of its name; in fact it was the fifth. But the other interesting part is that it was the second...

The Second Continental Congress was in full swing by now. The first committees are beginning to report out to the Congress. New committees are being created for various purposes. The Congress is meeting as a group to determine the state of America. And one committee is recruited to draft a proclamation that, to modern ears, might sound a little peculiar. But the fact is, even a hundred years later...

We’ve mentioned the Willett family in prior episodes. They were a prominent family at the east end of Long Island, and in what we’d now call the Queens portion of New York City, at a time when there wasn’t a whole lot of much else between the two. There are some landmarks around Long Island that have the Willet (the other ‘t’ dropped off somewhere in history) name att...

Peter Tondee and his wife Lucy ran Tondee’s Tavern in Savannah, Georgia. It was quite the location for revelry and such, and it was a popular meeting place up until it burned down in 1796, along with most of that city. Nowadays there’s a plaque in the side of the building where Tondee’s once stood. And on this day in 1775, the Sons of Liberty got together to throw the King a litt...

The Gunpowder Incident, Part 1 The Gunpowder Incident, Part 2 The Gunpowder Incident, Part 3 (OK, we lied then about it ending) It’s been nearly two months since the Gunpowder Incident started, and the entire time, the Royal Governor, Lord Dunmore, has been trying to keep things from getting out of hand. He might— might —have succeeded, had something not happened on this day in 1775. The pos...

Silas Deane was a delegate to the Continental Congress from Connecticut, and by most accounts he did a decent job of it, although he did lose his position after a dispute with Roger Sherman. He stuck around Congress anyway, helping however he could. The following year he went to France as a secret delegate to drum up support for the Colonies. Unfortunately when he returned he was accused of financ...

Joseph Warren is definitely one of the unsung heroes of the American Revolution. We last heard from him on March 5, when he did his You Are There routine describing the events of the Boston Massacre at a memorial event (in fact, we used the same cover art). Today he’s more of the guy with the common sense solution: “Hey, instead of having a whole bunch of little militias fighting this...

When I was a kid learning about the American Revolution, we somehow got it in our heads that Hessians were some kind of Super Troopers, practically undefeatable and certainly not to be trifled with. And to a certain extent, that was true. Hessians were professional soldiers, that is, they were mercenaries. What’s more, they were well-trained and well-paid. But still in the long run, they wer...

With all the talk of our good relationships with Canada possibly going awry in the light of tariffs being levied [or not] against that country, it’s interesting to recognize that there was, in fact, a genuine relationship established before the Colonies broke away from England. It started in 1774, and continues on this day in 1775, and there’s one more attempt in the works. But for the...

As we noted a couple of days ago, the Continental Congress had its share of delegates who wanted to take one more crack at reconciliation. To that end they’d begun working on the Olive Branch Petition, though it wouldn’t be ready to send to Britain for several more weeks. So when a letter came in from Lord North to one of the delegates, and the letter offered its own form of reconcilia...

By all accounts, Nathan Cutler was an effective lawyer and legislator, as his frequent returns to the Massachusetts Legislature, and later the Maine House of Representatives, will attest. And when a governor of the State of Maine died, he was able to step into the role until the term of office expired. Cutler could have probably remained Governor, but he’d turned down positions before, so it...

Some of what you’ll be hearing today will have overlap with yesterday’s episode, but we all have shorter memories, we read in an article…uh, somewhere. But in the long run, that’s okay, because context is everything, and it’s important to understand what a big deal this particular incident was against the bigger picture. The post May 28, 1775: The Battle of Chelsea Cr...

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 seques...