Crispus Attucks was an American whaler, sailor, and stevedore of African and Native American descent, who is traditionally regarded as the first person killed in the Boston Massacre, and as a result the first American killed in the American Revolution.
Robert Treat Paine was a lawyer, politician and Founding Father of the United States who signed the Continental Association and Declaration of Independence as a representative of Massachusetts. He served as the state's first attorney general and as an associate justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, the state's highest court.
Benjamin Church was effectively the first Surgeon General of the United States Army, serving as the "Chief Physician & Director General" of the Medical Service of the Continental Army from July 27, 1775, to October 17, 1775. He was also active in Boston's Sons of Liberty movement in the years before the war. However, early in the American Revolution, Church was also sending secret information to General Thomas Gage, the British commander, and when one of his letters into Boston was intercepted, he was tried and convicted of "communicating with the enemy". He was jailed but eventually released, likely dying somewhere in the Caribbean Sea in 1778.
Isaiah Thomas was an early American printer, newspaper publisher and author. He performed the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence in Worcester, Massachusetts, and reported the first account of the Battles of Lexington and Concord. He was the founder of the American Antiquarian Society.
The Boston Chronicle was an American colonial newspaper published briefly from December 21, 1767, until 1770 in Boston, Massachusetts. The publishers, John Mein and John Fleeming, were both from Scotland. The Chronicle was a Loyalist paper in the time before the American Revolution.
Samuel Adams was an American statesman, political philosopher, and a Founding Father of the United States. He was a politician in colonial Massachusetts, a leader of the movement that became the American Revolution, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and other founding documents, and one of the architects of the principles of American republicanism that shaped the political culture of the United States. He was a second cousin to his fellow Founding Father, President John Adams.
The Quincy family was a prominent political family in Massachusetts from the mid-17th century through to the early 20th century. It is connected to the Adams political family through Abigail Adams.
Caleb Davis was an American merchant, revolutionary patriot, and public servant in Boston, Massachusetts. He held several positions of public trust, including state legislator (1776–1788), Speaker of the Massachusetts General Court (1780–1782) and Elector for Massachusetts' Suffolk County in the first U.S. presidential election in 1789.
The Concert Hall (1752–1869) was a performance and meeting space in Boston, Massachusetts, located at Hanover Street and Queen Street. Meetings, dinners, concerts, and other cultural events took place in the hall.
Samuel Cooper was a Congregational minister in Boston, Massachusetts, affiliated with the Brattle Street Church. He was born in Boston to William Cooper and Judith Sewall, attended the Boston Latin School, and was graduated from Harvard College in 1743. He was ordained as a minister on May 21, 1746, and served as pastor of the Brattle Street Church, 1747-1783. Members of his parish at the Brattle St. Church included some of the most influential people of the American Revolution: John Hancock, Samuel Adams, Joseph Warren, John Adams, and others. He corresponded with Benjamin Franklin, Charles Hector d'Estaing, Gideon Hawley, Charles Gravier de Vergennes; and was associated with Phillis Wheatley. In 1780, he co-founded the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He served as "chaplain to the General Court" 1758-1770 and 1777-1783. Around 1783 Harvard College offered Cooper the position of college president, but Cooper declined. In September 1746 he married Judith Bulfinch; they had two daughters. A portrait of Cooper by John Singleton Copley now resides in the collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
John Mein was a Boston, Massachusetts, bookseller and publisher in the time before the American Revolution. Mein started Boston's first circulating library, and with his business partner, John Fleeming, Mein published the Loyalist newspaper, the Boston Chronicle, the first semi-weekly in New England.
Samuel Kneeland (c.1696–1769) was an American printer and publisher of The Boston Gazette and Weekly Journal. Kneeland obtained much of his work printing laws and other official documents for the Province of Massachusetts Bay colonial government for about two decades. He printed the first Bible in the English language ever produced in the American colonies, along with many other religious and spiritual works, including the Book of Psalms. He was also noted for introducing a number of innovations to newspaper printing and journalism. He was one of many colonial printers who were strongly opposed to and outspoken against the Stamp Act in 1765. Kneeland, primarily, along with his sons, were responsible for printing the greater majority of books, magazines and pamphlets published in Boston during his lifetime.
Samuel Phillips was an American Congregational minister and the first pastor of the South Church in Andover, Massachusetts. His son, John Phillips, was the founder of Phillips Exeter Academy, and his grandson, Samuel Phillips Jr., was the founder of Phillips Academy Andover and briefly the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts.
Ebenezer Pemberton was a colonial American Congregational clergyman, bibliophile, and minister of the Old South Church in Boston from 1700 to 1717. Under his ministry, the church broadened the scope of its worship and increased the privileges of its pupils, but also turned back to Puritan tradition. He wrote thirteen sermons and owned a valuable personal library.
Early American publishers and printers played a central role in the social, religious, political and commercial development of the Thirteen Colonies in British America prior to and during the American Revolution and the ensuing American Revolutionary War that established American independence.
The Massachusetts Gazette was a colonial American newspaper established by Richard Draper, printer for the royal governor and council in the Province of Massachusetts Bay. As the American Revolution drew closer, it was commissioned by the colonial government to lend its support for the measures of the British ministry. It was one of the few Loyalist newspapers operating during the years leading up to the revolution.
Andrew Barclay (1737–1823) was a Scottish bookbinder who emigrated from Kinross, Fifeshire, to Boston in the British-American colonies in the mid-eighteenth century. As the American Revolutionary War drew near, Barclay sided with the Loyalists and was compelled to leave Boston when the British were driven out in March 1776. Upon leaving Boston he was assigned a command in charge of getting Loyalist refugees out of Boston to Nova Scotia. Soon after, he continued his trade in British-occupied New York for the duration of the war. Bookbinder's trade labels like Barclay's, found on the inside cover of some of his works, are considered a rarity among books printed in colonial America.
