The Boston Massacre
Author(s): Serena Zabin

A dramatic untold peoples history of the storied event that helped trigger the American Revolution

The story of the Boston Massacrewhen on a late winter evening in 1770, British soldiers shot five local men to deathis familiar to generations. But from the very beginning, many accounts have obscured a fascinating truth: the Massacre arose from conflicts that were as personal as they were political.

Professor Serena Zabin draws on original sources and lively stories to follow British troops as they are dispatched from Irelandto Boston in 1768 to subdue the increasingly rebellious colonists. And she reveals a forgotten world hidden in plain sight: the manyregimentalwives and children who accompanied these armies. Wesee these families jostling with Bostonians for living space, finding common cause in the search for a lost child, trading barbs and and sharing baptisms. Becoming, in other words, neighbors. When soldiers shot unarmed citizens in the street, it was these intensely human, now broken bonds that fueled what quickly became a bitterly fought American Revolution.

Serena Zabins The Boston Massacre deliversan indelible newslant on iconic American Revolutionary history.

Review(s):
Alively gem of a book that expands our view of early-modern military life, pre-revolutionary Boston, and, in turn, the American Revolution.Washington Post“A well-written, thoroughly interesting addition to the social history of the American Colonies.”Kirkus Reviews “Penetrating and lyrical, ZabinsBoston Massacreoffers startling revelations on every page. To read this family history is to tread the cobbled streets of eighteenth-century British America, peering into shops, barracks, bedrooms, and government halls along the way. Zabins account ripples far beyond Boston on the vexed night of March 5, 1770, offering fresh understandings of the cause of liberty and its consequences. The American Revolutionindeed, early urban warfare itselfwill never look the same.” Jane Kamensky, Trumbull Professor of American History, Harvard University, and author ofA Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley “An intimate, complex, and moving picture of the friendships and family connections between Britons and Bostonians, in the throes of revolutionary change. Zabins eloquent account illuminates the ways in which the actors in this nation-making and empire-breaking drama experienced the rupture and transformation of the world they made together. Peter S. Onuf, author, with Annette Gordon-Reed, ofMost Blessed of the Patriarchs: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination

ISBN:9780544911154