Boston massacre 1770 what was it about

And Bostonian John Rowe found his usual social club flooded with British officers. The next day, British Captain Thomas Preston turned himself in to the justices of the peace. The Boston Massacre uncovers the inevitable human bonds between these two groups, presenting a new angle to an often-told narrative of the American Revolution. On the th anniversary of the Boston Massacre, Smithsonian spoke with Zabin about her new book and showing the personal side of a political event.

What role does now-ubiquitous sketch of the Massacre by Henry Pelham play in how people remember the event? Your opening anecdote of the book has Paul Revere crafting his engraving based on his own personal interpretation of the massacre — that of the British as the aggressors.

What does that tell us about recounting history? The Paul Revere engraving is probably the only thing that people really know about the Boston Massacre. Party because it's fabulous, partly because it is one of the very few images from 18th-century America we have that is not a portrait.

It's reproduced in every single textbook; we all know it, we've all seen it. But I wanted to show the way in which this picture itself really constitutes its own sleight of hand. We've made it part of our history. There are many incidents that we do and don't remember about the s that are part of the road to revolution.

And this is a pretty early one. It's a moment when no one's thinking yet about a revolution. But what's really interesting about the Boston Massacre is that even though no one's thinking about a revolution in , it's really only a couple of years before people take this incident and remake it so that it becomes part of the story.

So [the story] itself is able to create part of the revolution, although in the moment, wasn't that at all. What inspired you to write this very different examination of what happened that day? It came from happening on just one little piece of evidence from the short narratives that are published the week after the shooting.

We have an original copy here at Carleton, and I've been taking my class to see them. But after a few years, I really read the first one for the first time. Someone repeats that he had been hanging out in a Boston house with a [British] soldier's wife and is making threats against Bostonians. I started pulling on the thread, and then I went to Boston. It was used as propaganda something used to help or harm a cause or individual to demand the removal of British troops from Boston.

Due to the increasing tension in the city, British troops temporarily withdrew from Boston to Fort William on Castle Island. The British solders involved in the Boston Massacre were also brought to trial. Two of them were found guilty of manslaughter, punished, and discharged from the army. Paul Revere engraved and printed this depiction of the Boston Massacre in In , John Dickinson wrote a series of letters in which he outlined how many colonists wished not to be taxed purely for revenue for the British empire.

On March 5, , the Bostonians were fuming over taxes and constant surveillance by the British military, both of which had started two years prior. As a result, a small disagreement between a wigmaker apprentice and a soldier easily escalated to a small riot. Henry Knox, the future Secretary of War , was one of the first colonists on the scene, and told the soldier, Private Hugh White, that if he fired a shot, he would die.

Through the course of the day, a crowd of more than colonists came to the defense of the apprentice. White eventually felt unsafe enough to call for help. He sent a messenger to get Captain Thomas Preston and his battalion of seven troops as backup. Allegedly, the protestors became more violent, throwing objects at the soldiers and jeering at them. When the dust cleared, three colonists were dead; two others died later as a result of their wounds.

Attucks is considered the most famous African American of the Revolutionary War and eventually became a symbol for the abolitionist movement.