Episodes

There are lots of times when historians have to pull a lot of small pieces together to get a decent picture of events. They use oddball clues such as artifacts in paintings to determine someone’s state of health, for instance. They have to take into account that published reports could be propaganda in nature. But once in a while, something turns up that was written more or less at the time it happened, and what’s more it was written by someone who doesn’t necessarily have an agenda. And in th...

With the war in full swing and a Commander-in-Chief on his way to Boston, the Continental Congress took the next step of finding a way to organize the troops. So naturally they formed a committee. The Committee of Seven (maybe all the good names were taken?) worked diligently for about three weeks to put together a plan that would indicate just who could fight and how they would be organized. There were still some details to iron out, but in the meantime the disaggregated militias were getting ...

While the Green Mountain Boys were very successful so far in their military exploits, they were still just some unaffiliated militia group. At best they were considered Patriot-sympathetic, but not much else. After the capture of Fort Ticonderoga and Fort Crown Point, two of their leaders decided that it was time to get official recognition. So they headed down to Philadelphia to bring their case to the Continental Congress. The post June 23, 1775: Green Mountain Boys Get Legit appeared first ...

Here’s a hard economic reality: if you want to break away from a parent nation, you need to stop using their currency. Here’s another one: if you’re going to issue currency, you certainly need to have the capital to back it up. And you also don’t want to make it easy to counterfeit. The post June 22, 1775: Continental Cash appeared first on 250 and Counting.

New Jersey’s Provincial Congress first convened in May, but by now they’d gotten a bunch of stuff done. They’d already made arrangements to remove the Royal Governor from power, and resolved to do it like gentlemen (it didn’t work out that way, unfortunately). At this point the colony had only one delegate to the Continental Congress: a couple had resigned, one never showed up, and that left exactly one man holding down the fort. So the Provincial Congress appointed new delegates, with a specif...

Mike has already mentioned the location of the historical marker in today’s art. It’s tough to read even when you’re standing there, so here’s the text: At or near this place ever since known as “Liberty Point” was promulgated in June 1775, by patriots of the Cape Fear A Declaration of Independence of the British Crown. This was an extremely historic neighborhood, should you choose to visit. There are at least eight other historical markers within a short walking distance of this one, not all o...

Sometimes when you’re watching a movie or listening to music, you find yourself in the awkward position of separating the artist from the work, because it turns out that the artist has some shady stuff going on in the past, or even in the present. But the song/movie/book is just so good that you need to temporarily overlook that. Such is the case, we think, with Vardry Echols McBee, an entrepreneur and philanthropist who basically invented the town of Greenville, South Carolina. He was also a s...

It’s Cake and Candles today for a future State Representative of a future state. Orsamus Cook Merrill was born in Connecticut but moved to Vermont coincidentally the same year that the Vermont Republic was admitted to the Union as our fourteenth state. He spent the rest of his life in the Bennington area, working in jobs as diverse as newspaper editor or publisher, postmaster, attorney and Engrossing Clerk for the Vermont House of Representatives before becoming a Representative himself. (For ...

In the long run, the Battle at Bunker Hill Breed’s Hill was a tactical win for the British, but they incurred heavy losses and it took three tries to get that win. So why is it one of the battles that so many Americans seem to remember all these years later? We’re speculating here, but it’s possible that, between this battle and the ones at Lexington and Concord, the Colonial forces realized that this was a war that they could actually win: it wasn’t crazy at all to fight the British army. It ...

Yesterday, George Washington was unanimously elected Commander in Chief of the Continental Army. Today he officially accepted the position. He won’t take actually begin until early July (we’ll get to that episode in a few weeks), but take a look at this image here. He’s already in the blue coat, and his hair is whiter than it was in yesterday’s art. The truth about his hair color is likely somewhere in between these two images, but of course he wasn’t wearing a coat like that just yet. This a...

Jeez, I gotta stop writing these titles late at night. Sometimes the history books make it sound like some people just appeared out of nowhere, but they did have pasts. George Washington would be a good example. Washington has been nearly invisible since this show started on January 1, but that doesn’t mean that the Congress hollered “Anyone wanna be a general?” and he stepped up first. In fact, he was a delegate to the First Continental Congress in 1774, and for some time he’d been a member o...

No tongue-in-cheek for today. No weird jokes. No political stances. Just thanks for giving us America, and then helping us keep it. In today’s episode, Mike takes you back to the first day. The post June 14, 1775: Cake and Candles for the US Army appeared first on 250 and Counting.

It wasn't even close to being the first time, but this was an important "get": the colonist forces learned that troops were coming to capture Charlestown and Dorchester in an effort to break the siege. They got lucky, it all led to some ugliness and eventually both sides could call it a win, and both sides could call it a loss. The post June 13, 1775: Colonists Catch Wise…Again appeared first on 250 and Counting.

The folks in America wanted to ensure that the folks in Canada knew just how bad the conditions were, but the problem was that most of the regular inhabitants of Canada spoke French, so when the Continental Congress created documents meant to sway the Canadians to our side of the loyalty fence, they were written in French. But the problem was, they couldn’t use these documents as evidence for folks here in the Colonies, because not enough people understood French. What to do, what to do? The p...

Full Disclosure: I have no idea whether I pronounced “Machias” correctly. We’ll all have to live with that one, I suppose. The Battle of Machias was not exactly one of epic proportions. It was a couple of boats chasing after a couple of other boats, and one boat got away but the other one managed to damage itself and was ultimately boarded. So why is it significant? Well. Not only was it the first naval battle of the American Revolution, it was a battle that the Colonies won, no matter how yo...

In the wake of Lexington and Concord, some places didn’t wait to start assembling troops to fight off the British. Most of them were in that part of the Colonies, though. Enter the Berkeley County Riflemen, from a section of Virginia that is now West Virginia. George Washington put out the word that soldiers were needed, and about a hundred men from Martinsburg stepped up, even going so far as to ensure that they dressed mostly alike, since there was no Continental Army just yet, and therefore ...

We’ve spent all our time on the East Coast; let’s take a side quest to the West Coast to see what the Spanish are up to. We have two main players here: Bruno de Heceta, after whom at least two locations on the West Coast are named (and they’re pronounced differently, go figure), and Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra. They sailed together, each in charge of a ship, and made it almost to Canada before Heceta headed back to Mexico and Bodega y Quadra continued on up to Alaska. Their goal was t...

In the aftermath of the Gunpowder Incident, Lord Dunmore decided that the better part of valor involved getting out of town before the locals could get a good lynch mob together, and he left Virginia on the HMS Fowey. Here’s the interesting part: the Fowey which Dunmore boarded was not the first of its name; in fact it was the fifth. But the other interesting part is that it was the second one of that name to sink in American waters. The fourth HMS Fowey was a fifth-rate vessel (remember, rati...

The Second Continental Congress was in full swing by now. The first committees are beginning to report out to the Congress. New committees are being created for various purposes. The Congress is meeting as a group to determine the state of America. And one committee is recruited to draft a proclamation that, to modern ears, might sound a little peculiar. But the fact is, even a hundred years later a proclamation like this was quite common. The post June 7, 1775: Just Another Day In Congress app...

We’ve mentioned the Willett family in prior episodes. They were a prominent family at the east end of Long Island, and in what we’d now call the Queens portion of New York City, at a time when there wasn’t a whole lot of much else between the two. There are some landmarks around Long Island that have the Willet (the other ‘t’ dropped off somewhere in history) name attached to them; in fact when I was young I lived quite close to one of the roads named after that family. (Spider Robinson fans pl...

Peter Tondee and his wife Lucy ran Tondee’s Tavern in Savannah, Georgia. It was quite the location for revelry and such, and it was a popular meeting place up until it burned down in 1796, along with most of that city. Nowadays there’s a plaque in the side of the building where Tondee’s once stood. And on this day in 1775, the Sons of Liberty got together to throw the King a little birthday part, without balloons, or cake and candles, or much other than a little food and a lot of fermented beve...

The Gunpowder Incident, Part 1 The Gunpowder Incident, Part 2 The Gunpowder Incident, Part 3 (OK, we lied then about it ending) It’s been nearly two months since the Gunpowder Incident started, and the entire time, the Royal Governor, Lord Dunmore, has been trying to keep things from getting out of hand. He might—might—have succeeded, had something not happened on this day in 1775. The post June 4, 1775: The Gunpowder Incident: Epilogue appeared first on 250 and Counting.

Silas Deane was a delegate to the Continental Congress from Connecticut, and by most accounts he did a decent job of it, although he did lose his position after a dispute with Roger Sherman. He stuck around Congress anyway, helping however he could. The following year he went to France as a secret delegate to drum up support for the Colonies. Unfortunately when he returned he was accused of financial impropriety; it took some time to clear his name and when the dust settled, he was nearly broke...

Joseph Warren is definitely one of the unsung heroes of the American Revolution. We last heard from him on March 5, when he did his You Are There routine describing the events of the Boston Massacre at a memorial event (in fact, we used the same cover art). Today he’s more of the guy with the common sense solution: “Hey, instead of having a whole bunch of little militias fighting this thing…what if we put ’em all together into one big army?” And the Continental Congress, moving with its usual ...