Maryland has a peculiar place in most of America’s major events. During the Revolution, the Continental Congress hid out there for a while. During the Civil War, the state mostly sat out the war because it was a “Southern” state occupied by the Union throughout. But the War of 1812? Well, that was Maryland’s time […]

The post February 18, 1775 appeared first on 250 and Counting.

We’ve mentioned in the past that the intent of most of the Intolerable Acts and the Coercive Acts were designed to punish the Massachusetts Province, but it had some effect on the other colonies as well. What’s more, there was a growing worry that, if Parliament could do things like this to Massachusetts, what’s going […]

The post February 17, 1775 appeared first on 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 […]

The post February 16, 1775 appeared first on 250 and Counting.

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 […]

The post February 15, 1775 appeared first on 250 and Counting.

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 […]

The post February 14, 1775 appeared first on 250 and Counting.

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 […]

The post February 13, 1775 appeared first on 250 and Counting.

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. […]

The post February 12, 1775 appeared first on 250 and Counting.

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 […]

The post February 11, 1775 appeared first on 250 and Counting.

(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 […]

The post February 10, 1775 appeared first on 250 and Counting.

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 […]

The post February 9, 1775 appeared first on 250 and Counting.