of muskets and mayhem

The East India Company  ∙The Tea Act of 1773  ∙  American Indignation  ∙  Coffee: The American Stimulant∙  New York and Pennsylvania Take the Lead∙  Boston Plays Catch-Up∙  An Implacable Game of Tug-of-War  ∙  Guerrilla Theater  ∙  An Epocha in History The British East India Company Samuel Adams' fear over rebellious fervor 'sputtering out' after the Boston Massacre was off-set by the proposed violation of English rights to trial by a jury of one’s peers after the burning of the H.M.S. Gaspee and was further allayed by the discovery and publication of the Hutchinson letters. Nevertheless, these incidents could’ve gone the way of the Boston Massacre, passing into fond memory of more riotous times, if Parliament continued its policy of allowing the colonies to ‘drift’ into apathy. Adams received a greater boost towards the end of 1773 when Parliament blundered yet again. The actions taken in the publication of the Tea Act unified...

A Rebel Without A Cause  ∙  Chronus and Candidus  ∙  The Carolina Regulators  ∙  Lord Dartmouth∙  The Gaspee Affair∙  Committees of Correspondence  ∙  The Boston Pamphlet  ∙  A Province Aflame  ∙  The Hutchinson Letters  ∙  Hints on How to Make a Great Empire into a Smaller One A Day That Will Live in Infamy The Boston Massacre served as  a medicinal cathartic against the unbridled passions of radical Bostonians; as historian Page Smith writes, ‘In the eighteenth century, physicians prescribed bloodletting for a variety of ailments, especially for “fevers.” Someone fond of metaphor might have likened the Boston Massacre to a bloodletting (with the patient in this instance the populace of Boston) that reduced, if it did not cure, the revolutionary fever in that town. In another metaphor, it was as though the citizens of the Massachusetts Bay colony had come to the edge of the abyss and drawn back a...