Was the Boston Massacre inevitable? For its time, was it truly a “massacre”?

And how much do we really know about that night—and how much comes from the stories people chose to share?

📄 ⁠⁠Interview Transcript ⁠⁠

► In this interview, historian Dr. Serena Zabin reconsiders March 5, 1770—looking beyond propaganda to the people, choices, and social networks that shaped revolutionary action in the dark hours after the shooting and transformed how colonists understood their place within the British imperial family—setting the stage for revolution.

🚩About My 199th Guest:

Dr. Serena Zabin is a professor of history and the Liberal Arts at Carleton College. She is the Vice President of the Teaching Division of American Historical Association, a distinguished fellow in Early American History at the Huntington Library for 2024-25, and a former president of Society for Historians of the Early American Republic.

Her research focuses on Early America and Public History, subjects about which he has published extensively, including the following books:

1. "Dangerous Economies: Status and Commerce in Imperial New York",

2. "The New York Conspiracy Trials of 1741: Daniel Horsmanden's "Journal of the Proceedings" with Related Documents", and

3. "The Boston Massacre: A Family History", which received the 2024 George Washington Book Prize and is the focus of this interview.

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📑 Video Chapters:

03:48 March 5, 1770: What Happened?

08:49 Was It Really a “Massacre”?

10:10 Did Soldiers and Bostonians Know Each Other?

11:27 Did Anyone Expect Violence?

16:44 Paul Revere’s Image of the Massacre

21:43 Boston Massacre Conspiracy Theories

22:53 What Revere Exaggerated—or Invented

24:33 What Can We Really Know?

27:38 Revere's Motivation

30:19 The Trial: Politics or Performance?

31:18 The Boston Massacre on Trial

32:23 John Adams: Ethics or Politics?

34:18 Soldiers’ Self-Defense Explained

35:15 Adams and the Soldiers’ Defense

38:31 The Massacre as Family History

40:34 British Living Among Bostonians

44:14 Daily Life Before the “Massacre”

46:53 A Broken Imperial Family?

48:56 A Bad Divorce

53:10 Dr. Zabin and Ken Burns’ "The American Revolution"

55:22 "Just One Point"

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This interview with Dr. Serena Zabin examines the Boston Massacre—the social developments and everyday challenges faced by Bostonians and British residents that led to March 5, 1770, what happened that night, and, equally important, what followed, including Paul Revere’s propaganda and John Adams’s defense of the British soldiers.

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