Today we meet yet another prominent citizen who thought he had the solution for putting an end to the tension between the Thirteen Colonies and Great Britain. It’s important to note at this point, we think, that these people weren’t delusional; they were genuinely interested in maintaining a good relationship and therefore invested in repairing […]

The post February 28, 1775 appeared first on 250 and Counting.

And once again, we have someone (two someones, really) who manage to come up with a plan that will put all this unpleasantness between the Thirteen Colonies and the British Empire to rest, and once again the physical distance between the two threatens the success of those plans. What’s more, it turns out that the […]

The post February 27, 1775 appeared first on 250 and Counting.

It’s one thing to hear someone hollering “The British are coming!” and quite another to actually see them arriving in your port. And that’s especially true when they’re also seen confiscating the cannons that you’d hidden upriver. This wasn’t the first time something like this had happened, but there was something different about the Colonists’ […]

The post February 26, 1775 appeared first on 250 and Counting.

Today we review two different pieces of correspondence—one local, the other trans-Atlantic—in which the letter writers are clearly coming to the conclusion that things are not going well between the British and the Colonies, and that preparing for war is probably inevitable at this point. And that’s interesting on its own, but we also wanted […]

The post February 25, 1775 appeared first on 250 and Counting.

The interesting thing about surveillance in the 18th century is that, when you’re dealing with trans-Atlantic distances, the information moves slowly, and errors can be costly. We told you not long ago about someone who’d heard about the Minutemen, but had their numbers wrong by a factor of thousands. Fortunately in that case, it was […]

The post February 24, 1775 appeared first on 250 and Counting.

Alexander Hamilton isn’t really considered one of the Founding Fathers, largely because he’d only arrived in America from Scotland around the same time that things started getting ugly between the Colonies and the Crown. But he quickly took up the cause, and it’s clear from his writing that he was of a similar mind as […]

The post February 23, 1775 appeared first on 250 and Counting.

Back when Mike and Claude were kids, February 22 was celebrated as a national holiday, the 22nd being recognized as George Washington’s birthday. Lincoln’s Birthday was February 12, so we had two Federal holidays close together. (To be fair, Lincoln’s was always unofficially recognized.) Until, that is, 1968, when the Uniform Monday Holiday Act came […]

The post February 22, 1775 appeared first on 250 and Counting.

Of all the indignities we laid upon Claudius Herrick in this episode (okay, there weren’t that many), the worst is that we misspelled his name in the cover art.

The post February 21, 1775 appeared first on 250 and Counting.

Until Israel Gregg came along, steamboat commerce on the Ohio river was considered impractical, largely because the currents were so strong. But Gregg had an interesting approach to demonstrate that it was, in fact, possible. In some portions of the river, there was a confluence with another river, which meant that there were multiple currents […]

The post February 20, 1775 appeared first on 250 and Counting.

When I (Claude) was younger, I read a Star Trek novel titled The Final Reflection by John M. Ford. Trek novels weren’t considered canon, and later events in the films and subsequent series kind of wiped out some of the concepts put forth in the book, but what I found fascinating was that it was […]

The post February 19, 1775 appeared first on 250 and Counting.