A History of the Boston Massacre

FAIN: FT-57706-10

Serena Ruth Zabin
Carleton College (Northfield, MN 55057-4001)

An NEH Summer Stipend will support my work on "Occupying Boston: An Intimate History of the Boston Massacre." This study of the upheavals of a small city inundated with soldiers will reveal new aspects of the tangled relationships between the British army and its civilian hosts in the two years before the riot of March 5, 1770. Though the Boston Massacre is usually viewed as a military and political signpost on the path to the American Revolution, our own country's involvement overseas makes clear that occupation is not simply a political or military problem but a social one. My work on the Boston Massacre redefines its social and cultural importance by both reexamining the unsurprising tension between civilians and an occupying army and by uncovering the remarkable degree to which soldiers and civilians were related through kinship, marriage, and community-sometimes in relationships that few desired. My research recasts the Boston Massacre as a riot between neighbors, not strangers.