250 and Counting

Before I tell you a little bit about the First Virginia General Assembly of 1776 (which I do have to differentiate with a date, so it’s not confused with the First Virginia General Assembly of 1619), I wanted to spend a moment on the show’s cover artwork. For some reason it was in putting today’s […]

The post Virginia Is Open For Business–October 7, 1776 appeared first on 250 and Counting.

We’ve talked so much about Silas Deane that I don’t have much new to share in this space, so I’ll tell you a little about his house. The house in today’s cover art was completed in 1769. It’s located in Wethersfield, Connecticut. The facade is asymmetrical because there was a porch at one time. Deane […]

The post Deane Gets Busy–October 6, 1776 appeared first on 250 and Counting.

The cover art for today’s episode is the historical marker for Bergen Neck Fort, in Bayonne, New Jersey. As someone who was born and raised on the other side of the East River, it’s supposed to be my duty to bust on New Jersey and say something like “there’s nothing interesting going on in Bayonne” […]

The post A Fort Is Abandoned–October 5, 1776 appeared first on 250 and Counting.

War bonds have been a thing since literally the beginning of the country. In this particular case, Britain had spent a few years taking as much hard currency (that is, gold and silver) from America as they could, which left us in a pretty bad state when it came to having something to back our […]

The post Brother, Can You Spare $5 Million?–October 4, 1776 appeared first on 250 and Counting.

The New Jersey Seal looks like a complicated and maybe convoluted project on its surface, but when you take a closer look, it becomes clear that in fact a lot of thought went into it and many of the individual pieces do tie together. New Jersey statutes are pretty specific about the Great Seal. Title […]

The post The New Jersey Seal–October 3, 1776 appeared first on 250 and Counting.

Thomas Jefferson, after many months in Philadelphia, finally got to return home today. One of the things that puzzled me early on in this podcasting project was the relative fluidity of the membership of the Continental Congress. People came in, people went out, and nobody seemed to have a problem with it. There didn’t appear […]

The post Jefferson Goes Home–October 2, 1776 appeared first on 250 and Counting.

Thomas Mifflin was the Continental Army’s first Quartermaster General, and he was replaced by someone who just couldn’t get the job done, so he was asked to return to the position. He was good at the Quartermaster duties, but he really preferred to be on the front lines. Oddly enough, though, when the soldiers at […]

The post Re-Mastering the Army–October 1, 1776 appeared first on 250 and Counting.

Mount Vernon, the mansion along the Potomac River in which George Washington lived, was originally built by his father when George was two years old. At that time, however, it was a rather modest house. Washington’s half-brother Lance lived in the house until his death in 1752. After a year or two, George leased out […]

The post Washington’s Thoughts of Home–September 30, 1776 appeared first on 250 and Counting.

When you only have two minutes to get the point across, you sometimes lose some of the nuances. This is a rundown of the second letter discussed today: Abigail Adams penned a poignant letter to her husband, John Adams, who was still serving in the Continental Congress but hoping to get home as soon as […]

The post John Adams, Correspondent–September 29, 1776 appeared first on 250 and Counting.

As I mentioned a few days ago, when Pennsylvania drafted its constitution and then voted on it, not everybody involved was on board with the idea. In June 1776, The Pennsylvania Provincial Conference resolved “that the present Assembly of the Colony is ‘not competent to the exigencies of affairs’ and that a Provincial Convention ought […]

The post Pennsylvania Ratifies A New Constitution–September 28, 1776 appeared first on 250 and Counting.