Search Results for "Charles Paxton"
Your search for posts with tags containing Charles Paxton found 18 posts
What did the Customs service’s anonymous informer report about Thursday, 1 Mar 1770, 250 years ago today? He (or she) wrote: “the weekley Exhibition at Jacksons as usual.” Boys were once again picketing William Jackson’s hardware...
According to James Otis’s first biographer, William Tudor, Jr., after his brawl in the British Coffee-House in September 1769 he received care from “Doctors Perkins and Lloyd.”Dr. James Lloyd (1728-1810, shown here) was one of Boston’s...
Boston newspapers published three detailed descriptions of the fight between Customs Commissioner John Robinson and Boston representative James Otis, Jr., on 5 Sept 1769. The first appeared on 11 September, as Edes and Gill’s Boston Gazette printed...
In his diary John Adams described how he spent the evening of Sunday, 3 Sept 1769, in the Edes and Gill print shop: “preparing for the Next Days Newspaper—a curious Employment. Cooking up Paragraphs, Articles, Occurences, &c.—working...
After his fight with James Otis, Jr., became a big deal, Customs Commissioner John Robinson published his version of what had led up to it. That account was dated 7 Sept 1769 and appeared in Green and Russell’s Boston Post-Boy four days later. According...
I’ve been tracing the maneuvers in 1773 around the “Hutchinson letters.” Benjamin Franklin sent those documents to the speaker of the Massachusetts house under conditions of secrecy. The Massachusetts Whigs nibbled away at the edges...
It was no coincidence that James Joan moved from Halifax to Boston in October 1768, just as the 14th and 29th Regiments made the same journey. In fact, the same sloop that brought Joan and his family, Nehemiah Soanes’s Ranger, might well have carried...
What with The Saga of the Brazen Head, the January 1775 brawl between British army officers and watchmen, the federal government shutdown, and ordinary news, I’ve had to neglect what was happening in Boston in 1768 and 1769. So here’s what...
Jacob Bailey (1731-1808) graduated from Harvard College in 1755, ranked at the bottom of his class in social rank. He chose to go into the ministry, starting as a Congregationalist like most of his fellow New Englanders.Shortly after receiving his master’s...
On 21 Sept 1775, John Adams met Robert Rogers, the famous army ranger from the French and Indian War.After that war, Rogers fought in the British war against Pontiac. Then he tried governing a far west territory, only to get into a feud with Gen. Thomas...
Last month The Nib published Josh Trujillo and Levi Hastings’s comic about Gen. Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben as a gay man.I found it inaccurate at several spots. Yet the core message—that Steuben was both important to the Continental Army’s...
I’ve been discussing the public image of Customs official Charles Paxton (shown here in the Massachusetts Historical Society’s portrait). Paxton’s neighbors teased him for his elaborate courtesy and his bachelor status. A big part of...
When I say that Customs official Charles Paxton was “queer,” I’m not claiming to know whom he had sex with, or wanted to have sex with. I’m saying that Bostonians saw something odd in Paxton’s lifestyle and manners, and they...
Charles Paxton (1708-1788, shown here in a portrait at the American Antiquarian Society) was a major figure in Boston’s 1767 Pope Night procession.Not as a member of the North End or South End Gangs, to be sure. Paxton was the target of those processions,...
On Saturday, 4 November, Faneuil Hall will host a reenactment of the Boston town meeting I described yesterday, setting up a non-importation boycott against the Townshend duties. Meanwhile, in the surrounding marketplace volunteers will reenact an outdoor...
Eleven days after Andrew Oliver resigned as Massachusetts’s collector of the stamp tax on 15 Aug 1765, the Boston crowd mobilized again. It looks like the Stamp Act was no longer the main grievance on people’s minds on 26 August. Instead,...
About a century ago, there was a trend in American publishing to issue the works of famous authors in multi-volume sets. Those were “limited and numbered editions,” but that often meant the publisher would print only a few hundred copies with...
Boston 1775 now returns to exploring the sestercentennial of the movement against the Stamp Act, and specifically the experiences of Lt. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson.Hutchinson wrote his own long description of the Stamp Act disturbances in a letter to London,...
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.