Within days of the Boston Massacre, Bostonians politicized the event. They circulated a pamphlet about “the Horrid Massacre” and published images portraying soldiers firing into a well-assembled and peaceful crowd. But why did the Boston Massacre...
On the evening of March 5, 1770, a crowd gathered in Boston’s King Street and confronted a sentry and his fellow soldiers in front of the custom house. The confrontation led the soldiers to fire their muskets into the crowd, five civilians...
The Atlantic World has brought many disparate peoples together, which has caused a lot of ideas and cultures to mix. How did the Atlantic World bring so many different peoples and cultures together? How did this large intermixing of people and...
In 1621, the Pilgrims of Plimoth (or Plymouth) Colony and their Wampanoag neighbors came together to celebrate their first harvest. Today we remember this event as the first Thanksgiving. But what do we really know about this holiday and the people...
Between 1500 and the 1860s, Europeans and Americans forcibly removed approximately 12 million African people from the African continent, transported them to the Americas, and enslaved them. Why did Europeans and Americans enslave Africans? How did...
Our present-day American culture is obsessed with sports. To cite just two pieces of evidence of this, on average, more than 67,000 fans attend each National Football League game and more than 30,000 fans attend each Major League Baseball game. This...
Did you know that maps have social lives? Maps facilitate a lot of different social and political relationships between people and nations. And they did a lot of this work for Americans throughout the early American past. Martin Brückner, a...
Colonial Bostonians practiced slavery. But slavery in Boston looked very different than slavery in the American south or in the Caribbean. Today, Jared Hardesty, an Assistant Professor of History at Western Washington University and author of...
Located 600 miles from Philadelphia and over 700 miles from Québec City, early Detroit could have been a backwater, a frontier post that Europeans established to protect colonial settlements from Native American attacks. Yet Detroit emerged as a...
Why did England want to establish colonies in North America and how did Englishmen go about establishing them? Today, we explore the early days of English settlement in North America with Malcolm Gaskill, Professor of History at the University of...