Event Category: Special Series

A once-in-a-lifetime paint restoration project was completed at Old North Church in 2024 and 2025! Expert conservators painstakingly removed layers of white overpaint to reveal some of the church’s colonial-era artwork. The team uncovered 20 angels in the balcony arches that were painted in the late 1720s and 1730s by congregation member John Gibbs. Thousands…

In the 1770s, Boston was in a state of transformation and upheaval. While we mostly think of the American Revolution as the driver of this whirlwind of change, a technological revolution was happening at the same time. The introduction of street lamps in Boston had a profound effect on how people behaved at night. The…

After Major John Pitcairn was killed in the Battle of Bunker Hill, he was remembered in Britain as “a Gentleman of universal good character.” In Massachusetts, however, people still accused Pitcairn of having ordered redcoats to fire at the Lexington militia two months earlier. The major’s body was laid in the crypt of the Old…

Since the late 1800s, African American women have organized to create memorials commemorating Black women across time. As members of clubs, preservation organizations, and other groups, Black women have told their own stories through public history. During the Jim Crow era, the most memorialized Black woman in America was the writer Phillis Wheatley. Born in…

Written in 1943 by Esther Forbes, Johnny Tremain is among the best-selling children’s books of the 20th century. Intended for middle schoolers, the novel’s protagonist is 14-year-old Johnny Tremain, an apprentice silversmith working in Boston in the 1770s. When Johnny’s dreams of becoming a silversmith are dashed by a tragic accident, he takes a new job as…

What if America’s founding wasn’t inevitable? Long before the Articles of Confederation, colonial Americans spent over a century struggling to unite—and mostly failing spectacularly. Discover the forgotten stories of America’s “rough drafts”: the New England Confederacy’s bold 1643 experiment, the authoritarian disaster of the Dominion of New England, William Penn’s visionary continental congress proposal, and…

In his forthcoming book, A Resistance History of the United States, public historian Tad Stoermer argues that the U.S. was shaped by resistance—but not in the way we’ve been taught. The American Revolution did not secure liberty for the masses; it opened the door to either liberty or oppression, where only white men enjoyed all of…

Questions of gender identity and sexuality are nothing new. Long before people identified as transgender or lesbian, there were female husbands — people assigned female at birth who transed gender, lived as men, and entered into legal marriages with women. Early America is filled with histories of queer pioneers, from female husbands to sailors, children,…