Search Results for "Braintree"
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Your search for posts with tags containing Braintree found 39 posts
Edward Pierce (1735-1818) was a carpenter, farmer, and deacon in Dorchester. He came from the family that built and expanded the Pierce House, erected around 1683 and thus one of the oldest surviving structures in the state. The Dorchester Antiquarian...
On 27 Nov 1770, 250 years ago today, the second trial for the Boston Massacre got under way. It was supposed to start a week earlier, but the court had trouble finding twelve jurors who were ready to sit on what promised to be an unusually long, unusually...
In the fall of 1761, Hannah (Quincy) Lincoln (shown here, courtesy of the Harvard Art Museums) struck up a correspondence with Abigail Smith, the seventeen-year-old daughter of the minister of Weymouth.At the time, Lincoln was twenty-five years old and...
When Bela Lincoln was growing up in Hingham in the 1740s, his father—a wealthy farmer, town official, and militia colonel—insisted on sending him to Harvard College.Some people didn’t think Bela had the smarts for it. Others felt that...
Earlier this month I discussed how John Adams, the Rev. Anthony Wibird, and Dr. Bela Lincoln of Hingham competed for the attention of Hannah Quincy in north Braintree.Sometime in the spring of 1759 John wrote that he almost proposed to Hannah, only to...
To answer yesterday’s question, the Rev. Anthony Wibird, minister of the north precinct of Braintree (which became Quincy) never married.Even as he discussed marriage with the parson as another young man attracted to Hannah Quincy, John Adams may...
When Anthony Wibird came to Braintree to be the minister of the north parish in 1755, the congregation offered him £80 a year and £120 as a lump sum in “settlement money” when he married.Wibird held out instead for £100 a...
In the letter discussed yesterday, Mary Cranch wrote that she learned the news that “mrs P——l——r was brought to Bed” with a mysterious new baby from “mr wibird.”That was the Rev. Anthony Wibird (1729-1800),...
Your Most Obedient & Humble Servant is a new podcast hosted by Kathryn Gehred, one of the editors working on the forthcoming scholarly collection of Martha Washington’s correspondence.Each episode digs into one letter to or from a woman in the...
On Tuesday, 4 August, I’ll participate in an online conversation on the theme “Massachusetts Revolts!: How the Feisty New England Protests Changed the World.”This event is the latest digital discussion among historians to be organized...
As I quoted yesterday, in July 1775 John Adams sent his wife Abigail confirmation in writing that their tenant hand, an “old Man” named Hayden, should move out of the rooms he occupied in one of their Braintree houses. Hayden had refused Abigail’s...
Yesterday I started quoting Abigail Adams’s July 1775 letter to her husband John reporting on her conflict with a tenant and farm hand named Hayden.Abigail had asked Hayden to move out of the house where John had been born, or to use only some rooms...
Biographies of Abigail Adams emphasize how she managed the family farm and finances in Braintree while her husband John was away for long periods as a politician and diplomat.She had to go through a learning process, though. The couple was usually together...
The younger boy hit by “Swan shot” from Ebenezer Richardson’s musket on 22 Feb 1770 was named Christopher Seider (although that last name also showed up as Snider and in other forms). Christopher’s story starts with an effort to...
John Adams’s diary offers a case study of how well the Massachusetts Whigs kept the secrets that Benjamin Franklin asked Thomas Cushing to keep. Adams received the “Collection of Seventeen Letters” on 22 March 1773. Since he was no longer...
Here’s how Abigail Adams experienced the British evacuation of Boston on 17 Mar 1776. She was at the family home in Braintree, writing to her husband John in Philadelphia. (And she had a cold, but I’m skipping that.)I find the fireing was...
By 1789, John George Briesler had been working for John Adams (who always spelled his name “Brisler”) for five years. The newly elected Vice President had Briesler accompany him to New York and then Philadelphia during the Washington administration....
On 10 Feb 1788, Abigail Adams wrote from London to her sister Mary Cranch in Braintree that she was “very near when I am to quit this country.” It was one day short of four years since Adams had first written about bringing John Briesler to...
On 11 Feb 1784, Abigail Adams was preparing to join her husband John in Europe after years apart.She wrote to John about hiring household staff:I am lucky too in being able to supply myself with an honest faithfull Man Servant. I do not know but you may...
While looking at the newspaper coverage from 250 years ago this month, I was struck by some of the stories that Bostonians were reading at the same time they digested news of the imminent arrival of army regiments.For example, the Boston Evening-Post...
Notes on Post Tags Search
By default, this searches for any categories containing your search term: eg, Tudor will also find Tudors, Tudor History, etc. Check the 'exact' box to restrict searching to categories exactly matching your search. All searches are case-insensitive.
This is a search for tags/categories assigned to blog posts by their authors. The terminology used for post tags varies across different blog platforms, but WordPress tags and categories, Blogspot labels, and Tumblr tags are all included.
This search feature has a number of purposes:
1. to give site users improved access to the content EMC has been aggregating since August 2012, so they can look for bloggers posting on topics they're interested in, explore what's happening in the early modern blogosphere, and so on.
2. to facilitate and encourage the proactive use of post categories/tags by groups of bloggers with shared interests. All searches can be bookmarked for reference, making it possible to create useful resources of blogging about specific news, topics, conferences, etc, in a similar fashion to Twitter hashtags. Bloggers could agree on a shared tag for posts, or an event organiser could announce one in advance, as is often done with Twitter hashtags.
Caveats and Work in Progress
This does not search post content, and it will not find any informal keywords/hashtags within the body of posts.
If EMC doesn't find any <category> tags for a post in the RSS feed it is classified as uncategorized. These and any <category> 'uncategorized' from the feed are omitted from search results. (It should always be borne in mind that some bloggers never use any kind of category or tag at all.)
This will not be a 'real time' search, although EMC updates content every few hours so it's never very far behind events.
The search is at present quite basic and limited. I plan to add a number of more sophisticated features in the future including the ability to filter by blog tags and by dates. I may also introduce RSS feeds for search queries at some point.
Constructing Search Query URLs
If you'd like to use an event tag, it's possible to work out in advance what the URL will be, without needing to visit EMC and run the search manually (though you might be advised to check it works!). But you'll need to use URL encoding as appropriate for any spaces or punctuation in the tag (so it might be a good idea to avoid them).
This is the basic structure:
http://emc.historycarnival.org/searchcat?s={search term or phrase}
For example, the URL for a simple search for categories containing London:
http://emc.historycarnival.org/searchcat?s=london
The URL for a search for the exact category Gunpowder Plot:
http://emc.historycarnival.org/searchcat?s=Gunpowder%20Plot&exact=on
In this more complex URL, %20 is the URL encoding for a space between words and &exact=on adds the exact category requirement.
I'll do my best to ensure that the basic URL construction (searchcat?s=...) is stable and persistent as long as the site is around.
