Here is a look at the virtual events we have planned this week: On Tuesday, 25 January, at 5:15 PM: Earthquakes in New England, 1600-1800: Extraordinary Natural Events & Timekeeping Practices in Early America with Katrin Kleeman, German Maritime Museum – Leibniz Institute for Maritime History, and comment by Lukas Rieppel, Brown University. New England […]

By Benjamin D. Remillard, University of New Hampshire, Benjamin F. Stevens Fellow, MHS Seeking opportunity and community following the War for Independence, growing coastal hubs like Boston became attractive destinations for free people of color. Many of these residents and recent migrants were engaged members of their communities. Cato Newell, for instance, was a twenty-three-year-old baker […]

By Lucy Wickstrom, Adams Papers Intern Like many younger siblings, Thomas Boylston Adams experienced a combination of gratitude and annoyance at his older brother John Quincy’s protectiveness. In the autumn of 1794, they voyaged together to Europe, where John Quincy was to work as foreign minister to the Netherlands with Thomas as his secretary. As they […]

Here is a look at the virtual events we have planned this week: On Tuesday, 18 January, at 5:15 PM: The Emergence of the Marriage Market with Lindsay Keiter, Pennsylvania State University – Altoona, and comment by Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor, University of California – Davis. When did Americans begin using the term “the marriage market,” and what does that […]

By Neal Millikan, Series Editor for Digital Editions, The Adams Papers Transcriptions of more than 2,500 pages of John Quincy Adams’s diary have just been added to the John Quincy Adams Digital Diary, a born-digital edition of the Adams Papers editorial project at the Massachusetts Historical Society. The new material spans the period January 1830 […]

By By Susan Martin, Senior Processing Archivist In my last two posts (part I and part II), I shared the story of Mary Breed, as told in an autobiographical manuscript she sent to the MHS in 1933. I can’t in good conscience conclude her story without discussing some particularly interesting passages which relate less to the […]