250 and Counting

David Barclay was a British merchant who frequently plied his trade with other merchants in the Colonies. Such trade was quite lucrative for him, so when the Stamp Act was enacted, he stood to lose a lot of money because the Colonists would simply look elsewhere for the goods he sold. Likewise, when the Intolerable Acts, and the Coercive Acts were enacted, Barclay stood to suffer even more. So Bar...

Only a few people had figured it out, and it’s not clear whether they were just guessing, but by this point in time both England and the Colonies were locked into a path that would lead inevitably to a shooting war. To that end, Parliament approved sending over four thousand soldiers and sailors to the Colonies to help keep them in line. But it wasn’t as simple as that; there were stil...

When it comes to Black people and their role in the American Revolution, the one name that most people appear to remember is that of Crispus Attucks, largely because he was the first person killed in the Boston Massacre, and that event is thought of as the beginning of the Revolutionary War, therefore it’s significant that the first person to die in the name of American freedom was a person...

Here’s a peek behind the curtain: Mike and Claude do their own research for the individual shows, though Mike did the initial setups for the dates. So he’s the one who figured out what happened when, and then they each do the deeper research for the episodes they record. So Mike probably had no idea that there was a familial connection to this episode for Claude. For what it’s wo...

We realize that this is going to come as a huge surprise to you, but when the future Louisa Catherine Adams met her future mother-in-law, it was not an auspicious occasion. This delayed—but did not prevent—Louisa from marrying John Quincy Adams, but Abigail Adams didn’t have a lot of respect for Catherine for many years. In the meantime, she and John Quincy had some ups and downs in their ma...

There are many events in the life of William Hall that could be ascribed to just plain luck on his part, and others which could conceivably tied to some shrewd timing on his part. But in the end, we think we’re going with luck. If he hadn’t survived two Cherokee ambushes, if he hadn’t been an officeholder previously, if he hadn’t been the Speaker of the Senate when a scanda...

(N.B. We apologize that we initally uploaded this episode in the wrong format. We have no idea whether it made your podcast player cry, or anything else. At any rate, that’s fixed. Again, apologies.) While Massachusetts, and Boston in particular, were getting a lot of attention from the British, it’s not as though the other colonies sat back and watched everything happening from afar....

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 as...

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&...

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 submitting essays to the Boston Gazette un...

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 to Charles Thomson, the Secretary of the Continental Congress, which s...

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 … Continue reading 250 and Counting: February 4, 1775

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 … Continue reading 250 and Counting: February 3, 1775

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 … Continue reading 250 and Counting: February 2, 1775

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 … Continue reading 250 and Counting: February 1, 1775

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 … Continue reading 250 and Counting: January 31, 1775

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 … Continue reading 250 and Counting: January 30, 1775

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 … Continue reading 250 and Counting: January 29, 1775

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 … Continue reading 250 and Counting: January 27, 1775

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, … Continue reading 250 and Counting: January 26, 1775

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 … Continue reading 250 and Counting: January 25, 1775

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 … Continue reading 250 and Counting: January 24, 1775

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 … Continue reading 250 and Counting: January 23, 1775