the most immoral testament in the portrait gallery was not a hall of heroes but a place to reflect on those people who have changed the national conversation and got us to where we are today. >> watch american history tv this weekend on c-span 3. on march 5, 1770, a group of british soldiers shot into a crowd and killed five american protesters in boston massachusetts. next, on american history tv, the university of utah history professor eric visits the incident in his book boston massacre. from the massachusetts historical society, this is about 50 minutes. >> i have a tangled

relationship with boston, i'm not from here i grew up in a small town in south dakota but i first visited here as a 12- year-old when my brother was in school and this trip made an enormous impression on me. we watched the freedom trail and iser i saw my first major league baseball game at fenway park. i started a program intended to rate my first seminar paper on boston in the era of the american revolution then changed my mind and chose a different topic. that topic led me to my dissertation project and ultimately, i followed a different intellectual path entirely. but this has been a winding path and led me back to boston after all. it's a pleasure to work on a boston topic for a number of reasons. unlike much of my earlier work

which has been focused on relatively little-known characters and events, it's a place in time that immediately resonates with lots of people. while much of my earlier work has involved following the most evidentiary threads the sources for the project are so rich that at times they were overwhelming. in fact it was the richness of the source material that led me to the boston massacre project in the first place. there are over 200 eyewitness accounts relating to the events that evening. they are inconsistent with each other in many ways. i became curious about what it would mean to work through that testimony systematically. the boston massacre is the most densely described event in early american history yet paradoxically, the fact makes it surprisingly hard to say what actually happened. in the most general way, this struck me as interesting problem of narrative analysis. as i worked more deeply into the source materials i became absorbed by the dilemma the british empire faced in implementing new policies. one key aspect of the dilemma was to post 2000 troops in america

after 1773 which created all problems in civilian military relations. i teach the american revolution to undergraduates one point i like to make as americans, we instinctively identify with those embattled colonials fighting against the world superpower. the real essence of the revolution for americans today i would argue, don't have as much to do with colonies as they have to do with great written. which was so similar in the late 18th century to the united states in the early 21st. a dominant world power believed it was a force for good in the world. the correspondence of british officials dealing with the challenge of governance in north american colonies as they agonized about the best way to balance the exercise of power with the right liberties and interests of distant peoples.

in addition to the rich source material housed in the mhs and other boston repositories, the project gave me an opportunity to work in depth in the papers of thomas gage, the commander in chief of british forces in north america during the 1760s and 1770s. the papers which reside in the clements library in the university of michigan comprise one of the most astonishing tropes of 18th-century research material than anywhere in the world. they pick up they take up 70 linear shelf spaces in the library. 169 volumes with an additional volume of financial record which gives researchers a glimpse on how difficult a task gage was assigned in the 1760s and 1770s how he describes the job in the book. quoting briefly from the book,

"as commander in chief it was thomas gage's responsibility to manage the logistics of britain's north american army after 1763. the details were daunting. in 1766 they had soldiers stationed at 37 different posts with forces ranging in size from a company of 40 men to a battalion of about 350. it stretched from st. john to newfoundland to fort butte on the lower mississippi. some 3300 miles in distance from each other. approximately the distance separating london from jetta the ancient port city on the red sea. many posts were accessible only by long overland marches or water roots interrupted by daunting portages. viewed from its headquarters in new york, the army's nerve center of transatlantic communication, the network of posts included halifax which anchored the british cursory's in the northeast. niagara, detroit, michelin mackinac which linked to the great lakes to the mississippi. in apalachee, pensacola, mobile strung along the gulf coast.

simply to take in the strategic significance of all these posts to appreciate the ways the climate and geography differed from one another and to grasp how native american nations determine their capacity for effective action the challenges of managing a british army were legion and only administrative acumen could make it work. gage was a competent administrator. from his headquarters in new york he maintained a intricate web of correspondence with lines

stretching outward to dozens of american outposts. incoming letters from the hinterland detailed the dilapidated state of british fortification and facilities, the challenges of diplomatic relations with dozens of native american nations previously unknown to the british and conflict between officers and merchants among 1000 other things. at the same time, he was a necessity in close and continual contact with the war office and the border of trade. he knew the north american setting well enough to be sympathetic to the colonies interest. but only to the point where they intruded to the capacity of the empire to function. he was above all, a pragmatist. a busy pragmatist with little patience for the sensitivity of colonial radicals that they were beginning to display for questioning the constitution of law and right. here's a quick sampler of what the researcher finds within the gauge papers. organized chronologically gauges letters to the commanding officers in boston sit alongside letters to the commanders of detroit or kaskaskia or pensacola. this is a letter from gage to william dalrymple. my favorite of the three men serving as commanding officer in the occupation of boston.

here is a letter from dalrymple to gauge written on the same day. >> he kept his letters short as he could. long often responses in their own terrible handwriting dealing out the complexities of their assignment. there is a collection of warrants or financial documents that helped me track the way the british army spent money during the occupation, this is a topic that i came to find especially fascinating. in the decision to station troops in boston in the fall of 1768. the is is -- the irresistible

force ran up against the immovable object of boston's political culture. in several key respects boston was unique among the poor towns of british north america. it had stagnated economically and demographically. it had a town meeting form of government which made its political culture especially popular. it had a republican and puritan heritage rooted in the english crisis of the 17th century that gave it its own distinctive grammar and vocabulary of protests. let me read a few passages from the book this time edited and stitched together a little bit. in 1700 boston have the most robust maritime economy in british north america. only london and bristol ranked ahead of boston in the number of vessels ready to enter the port. townspeople participate in the growth of maritime enterprise not only as laborers but as investors and also to a surprising degree. in the early 18th century, 544 of boston adult males who now were 1800 overall owned share of at least one vessel. the images highlight posten's maritime boston's maritime origins. it illustrates a fact well

known to you all that boston was a peninsula almost an island throughout the waters of the boston harbor and really more connected to the speed than to the land. the second image, the famous map of boston, which was engraved and printed in 1722 illustrating the way the waterfront dominated the town. bites mercantile activity boston's population grew by 30% during the 1720s and 1730s despite devastating waves of smallpox in 1721 and again, in 1730. by 1740, boston had 17,000 residents and appeared to be entering a era of sustained population and growth. but it did not come instead,

against all expectation, boston fell into the shadow of other ports, large and small, while the economy suffered waves and contractions. in contrast, every other port town in british north america, the population ceased to grow. in 1770 boston was smaller than it was in 1740. it's merchants faced competition from philadelphia which tasked agricultural land in boston from new york which challenged boston dominance in trade with the british isles and from smaller new england ports like salem, marblehead, newberry,'s which began shipping dried fish to the west indies to the mediterranean and captured a growing share of the ship building industry that had become so important to the region's economy. this was the context in which the boston caucus came to the forefront in boston politics envisioning itself as the vessel for local interests thought to manage the business of town meetings. the crisis of the 1760s and 1770s brought a generational transition in caucus leadership

. led by samuel adams junior and james otis junior among others, the caucus used the town meeting as a mouthpiece for expressing collective grievances. with a distinctive voice, sometimes plaintive, often outrage, always standing on principle which gave shape and focus to the towns collective rhetorical identity. its efforts were paralleled by other organizations that were created to shape opinion and when necessary, mobilize action. the merchant club which evolved into the boston society for encouraging trade and commerce, the royal nine which you all know as the sons of liberty and the union club drawn from gangs from the north and south and which made itself periodically available to the royal nine to provide muscle for crowd action. boston had achieved a greater degree of concorde and cooperation between radicals and moderates. proceeded farther in mobilizing public action against imperial intrusions than any other anglo- american town.

three newspapers the boston evening post, the boston gazette, and massachusetts gazette served as mouthpieces for the movement giving coherent and sustained attention to radical concern. and the web of local association with bostonians especially well-equipped to organize crowd action when it suited their purpose. it was precisely because they feared the crowd action and because it was painfully aware of the impetus in the face of them that massachusetts governor francis bernard, began agitating for troops in boston in 1768. officials in london heard what he had to say and a riot, circulator circular letter and a provocative town meeting amped up official concern. by the time general gage was making arrangements for four regiments and an artillery

company to land in boston, he thought it was probable that they would be met by armed force and organized a transport as a military operation as an aside, one of the things that surprised me in my research was to discover how many different times gage and other leading figures in this conflict between the town and the empire, how many times people fought war would be able to break out between 1768 and 1775. when the troops landed on november 1, 1768 nobody shot at them and then they were to try to figure out where they should stay. there was a great deal to be said about the search for a place to stay in the 17 months of occupation that followed. the book devotes two chapters to that period. for tonight i want to jump ahead to the shooting, to consider what we know and talk a little bit about the effort to control the narrative. because what happened was disputed from the beginning.

the three boston newspapers with the radical leanings, round ran accounts of the shootings after they occurred. two of the papers were especially detailed and all three agreed on the essential elements of this story. one loyalist paper in town the boston chronicle, inclined to offer its own version. the accounts of the patriot newspaper contained some of the most familiar elements to the boston massacre story and stressed for example the conflict grew from a playful a fronting of the house century by a few high-spirited boys agreeing the soldiers seemed to be spoiling for a fight for no good reason, and that these shootings came quickly without any real provocation. for boston residents who had been present to witness the shootings for themselves the newspaper accounts plus whatever word-of-mouth was speculated within their neighborhoods would have been all they knew within the shootings. the boston town meeting arranged for deposition to be taken and a pamphlet to be

drafted. published together by the end of the month titled a short narrative of the massacre in boston intended for a english audience but did not circulate globally for months after it was locally for months after it was printed. it echoed the claim that soldiers were wreaking havoc in towns before the shootings that the men in front of the customhouse fired into the crowd with little provocation and that there were relatively few people in the streets before the shootings started. most of them boys. it also added a new incendiary claim that shots were fired from the window of the customhouse and further implied that the customs commissioner and soldiers of boston stood together and plan to orchestrate the shooting. 96 depositions were added as an appendix to the pamphlet and there were less coherent stories told in the narrative but it relied on key claims by various witnesses to make this case.

at the same time, local justices of the peace were taking depositions around town, british officers began to collect their own testimonies much provided by soldiers. one british customs left boston with 28 depositions which was the appendix for a second pamphlet intended for british audience titled a fair account of the late unhappy disturbance in boston and new england, it said many a claims on their head. it was townspeople, not soldiers rampaging through the streets of boston. in the hours before the shooting. it was townspeople who had a premeditated design to provoke violence. to this end, hundreds of people were among the streets and assaulting soldiers there so violently that they could not help but fire.

most people who had engaged casually with the question of what happened that night come away with an impression that the answer is fairly straightforward. stories have contributed to that impression. most scholars who've written about the shooting have pieced together events that act as a best guest narrative. they sorted through the eyewitness testimony, amplified witnesses claims while silencing others, and applying a unstated test of plausibility, in the process have suppressed anomalies and smoothed out inconsistencies. in this book i take the opposite approach, i'm relatively agnostic about most of these details though in general, i believe the town was extremely disingenuous in the way it characterized the events leading to the shootings as prior testimony was made clear.

on a number of key points it's impossible to say for sure exactly what happened. but is perhaps more interesting 250 years after the fact to see the way narratives were constructed around the shooting. there were no impartial observers everyone had a direct take in the version of events that would become accepted as fact and people worked very hard to sell the version that best appealed to their sensibilities. here's a fundamental truth about eyewitness testimony the human mind doesn't simply recall everything it sees recording a unerring and objective account of events as they happen especially not in times of stress. instead, we pick up patches of highly subjective impressions. only through narrative and by subsequently devising a story are we able to patch together a story in a meaningful pattern to the instantaneous effect such as the shootings in the customhouse acquire a form that could be recalled and interpreted and argued for.

in the space between the first impression and coherent narrative, all kinds of considerations conscious and unconscious could intervene. leading figures in boston had a enormous stake in presenting the town as a orderly place, a community of law and not a mob- ish town as british officials had been complaining for years. the newspaper and pamphlet account of the shootings went to great lengths to imply that no townspeople offered serious provocation to the soldiers. one useful rhetorical device in making such a case was to emphasize the involvement of boys, apprentices, youths. all these terms ambiguous, though they were implied the publication directed at the soldiers were provocation against the soldiers were playful and on intensifying. they had their share of anecdotes with which to make such a case.

paul revere's famous print of the shootings amplified the impression shared by most bostonians that the aggression lay with the soldiers. this print is not a accurate representation of the events of march 5, 1770 but a rhetorical instrument making an argument about the soldiers and the town , the commanding officer william preston, who is in the foreground on the far right stands with his sword raised giving the order to fire. the soldiers appear to be firing in unison. the townspeople here are innocent bystanders. well-dressed, well-meaning and aggrieved. and in the color versions of the print blood flows copiously from wounds, the images intended to portray a illegitimate assault on a citizen raid. it was intended for a english audience and did not circulate in town until seven several

months after it was printed. paul revere's engraving was available in march. in boston it hung in the walls of homes, taverns, coffee houses, and was so familiar that josiah quincy junior one of the lawyers who defended the soldiers in his trial referred to a argument of the power that this print exerted on people's imagination. the prince exhibited in our houses of avid wings to fancy he contended and in the fervor of our appeal reason in hazard has been lost. revere by the way, as an aside, stole this picture based on a painting by henry powell, a

competing engraver in town who intended to engrave and print and circulate his own version somehow revere got his hand on the image and beat him to the press. his own very similar version appeared one week after paul revere's but did not sell as well, only two known copies survived. we know of the providence of these images only because he wrote a angry letter to paul revere that has been preserved which accused him of damaging his interest by copying his work. newspaper accounts that printed images weren't the only ways in which the town of boston cultivated its sense of grievance over the shootings. on march 8, town leaders organized a mass funeral for the first four victims. samuel gray, samuel maverick, james caldwell, and christopher maddox. 10-12,000 people marched in funeral processions it's supposed according to the boston gazette that there must have been a greater number of people in town and country of those massacred by the soldiers than were ever together on this continent on any other occasion. on the first anniversary of the shooting continuing every year after after the war of independence a annual funeral

oration delivered by local speakers reminded townspeople of the horror and outrage of the massacre in 1770 which soon grew into the most public event in boston annual calendar. the massacre orations were fascinating occasions, the text of these were published so we know pretty much what was said. developing space to analyze those texts and to make an account of joseph warren's oration in march 1775 when troops were once again occupying boston and his speech was an episode of high drama. a really interesting story that i took a lot of pleasure in working through during the book. one officer and eight enlisted men were arrested for the shootings. captain thomas preston who led the soldiers from the guardhouse to the customhouse to defend the century against the crowd, private hugh white, corporal william webb and private john carroll, james harden, matthew kilroy, william

mccauley, hugh montgomery, and william morris. initially everyone expected them to be tried quickly but seven and the humps -- seven and half months to trial. they were largely forgotten with two more trial after that. first consider charges against four men accused from the customhouse window when they were acquitted principal witness against them a 14-year- old service boy was tried and convicted of perjury. the book considers four of those trials in interest of time i will focus here only on the second trial of the eighth soldier. >> in the present day two names are indelibly associated with the boston massacre, john adams and chris maddox. adams boston's most famous revolutionary defender disorders defended the soldiers in a case

more familiar now since the miniseries on john adams devoted the first episode to the boston massacre and its aftermath. a sailor of mixed heritage is best known as one of the massacres victims. the only identifiable name on the list. widely remembered as the first african-american martyr of the american revolution, commonly presented today as a patriot hero in children's literature and in textbooks. the trial of preston and his soldiers are famous largely because adams is famous. and he went to great lengths to ensure... that people would remember his role in the trials which he considered to be heroic. a important way that they were

heroic as adams emphasized it was greatly to boston's credit the soldiers could get a fair trial in such a heated atmosphere. the acquittal of preston and most of his men demonstrated to the world boston was a community of laws not a mob-ish town. sort of, the problem with this oversimplified explanation is that in order to win acquittal for the soldiers adams had to prove boston was in fact a mob- ish town which was not an argument that adams wanted to make but was the only way to justify the soldiers actions. for cicely because he was caught in a impossible bind in sending the soldiers the way he went about making the argument is interesting. he stressed the violence of the crowd at the same time emphasizing out of boston was not responsible for it. instead of arguing the soldiers

were taunted by a handful of playful boys he had to make the case the soldiers were truly threatened but not by true bostonians. the crowd, adams argued was a mob of strangers who had nothing to do with the solid citizenry of the town. many of these people were thoughtless and in considered inconsiderate adams argued. that point was especially important because he wanted to distinguish the mob from the town the post -- he was made famous singled out to amplify the significance to achieve a desired rhetorical effect. once the trials were over the printed account of the trial was the most accessible version of then subsequent readers. he was a sailor and dockworker from framingham massachusetts. his father was a african slave, his mother was a wampanoag indian. he was initially identified as michael johnson. contemporary documents refer to

him simply as the mulatto, he was doubly an outsider to boston. in his closing argument the testimony of a single witness to argue that he was to blame for the shooting. a sailor and casual laborer, he was a useful symbol of the outside agitators who adams wanted to blame for the riot. the violence was instigated, he argued by not ordinary townspeople by a motley rabble of saucy boys, and outlandish actors. and he implied this man was the ringleader. to make his case he ignored the testimony of numerous witnesses to describe the scene in detail, and either sailed to notice him before he was shot or recalled he was a passive bystander but instead he focused on the account of andrew, a young slave owned by oliver wendell who claimed he

saw a man he thought was attics rush forward and clubbed a soldier over the head before he was shot dead. he scoffed at the account. and left the other witnesses stone blind he contended to the details not existing anywhere except in his own brain. adams, however had skepticism high the story of his aggression was just the detail that he needed to defend the soldiers and protect boston's reputation at the same time. because he was no bostonian. set upon, adams argued, by "a stout lotto fellow whose very looks were enough to terrify any person what had not the soldiers then to fear?" he asked the jury. whose behavior in all probability the dreadful carnage of that night is

chiefly to be ascribed. the jury returned its verdict in 2 1/2 hours and brought manslaughter convictions against matthew kilroy and hugh montgomery the men who shot most certainly felt victim. after accounting for montgomery shot who was believed to kill it will then follow the judgment in the trial narrative reads that the other three were killed not by the other six prisoners but by three of them only and therefore, they can't all be found guilty of it. on the strength of the argument six of the eight were acquitted and discharged nine days later montgomery and kilroy returned to court for sentencing. the normal sentence for manslaughter conviction was death but by the 18th century it had become common practice to allow first-time offenders to plead the benefit of clergy and receive clemency. to ensure montgomery and kilroy would not get the same consideration again, they were branded on the thumb and then

set free and like the other defendants shipped to new jersey to rejoin the regimen. by the 1860s adams's version of events was the most familiar one in print thanks to the publishing count of the trial. the lesson of his supposed role had begun to change fundamentally. championed by a abolitionist in boston named william cooper now, he had been recast as the first african-american martyr for american liberty. boston's abolitionist sentiments were sharpened after the passage of the beefed-up fugitive slave act which empowered federal agents to recapture slaves who had escaped to free states and required local officials to cooperate in those efforts. the reality of this new law came home to bostonians in several cases of recapture in the 1850s. none more sensational or rightly opposed -- or widely opposed in 1754.

he was escorted from the courthouse to the harbor where he was carried back to slavery in virginia. this was the immediate context for this print issued in 1856. four years before the election of abraham lincoln who started the civil war, a context that made christmas attics a particular hero. this beautiful image is owned by the massachusetts historical society. based on a drawing by the boston illustrator, the buildings in the background scene are familiar from the print and in every other way the parts from the early images fundamentally, champions by the print in a different era with

distinctly different purposes let's note a few of the ways he had departed. we still have a line of soldiers in the crowd but captain preston is no longer issuing the order, he has been knocked to the ground and is cowering in the face of the crowd. and what a crowd it is. unlike revers passive unarmed bystanders, every member of this crowd is brandishing a club and many clubs are raised threateningly against soldiers. they are discharging their guns in self-defense not on the captain's orders. the most striking difference in his version of the mad sugar massacre, a man grabbed a bus get a musket wall the soldier

is presumably about to fire. by 1856 this man was widely regarded as the most important participant in the event of march 5th 1770. his reputation continued to grow through the civil war era and beyond. boston activists campaigned for almost half a century for a monument to the massacre victims which would foreground his involvement. and i might note parenthetically the massachusetts historical society weighed historically against the monument. the chapters in my book discussed the discussion. i won't go into any more detail about it tonight however. despite the views of the esteemed members of the massachusetts historical society those who campaigned for the monument finally succeeded and in 1896 it was erected on the boston commons. it commemorated all five victims from the beginning known as the christmas -- crispus attics monument. it's a 25 foot pillar with the victims name inscribed near the top. in front of the pillar is

a 7 foot bronze statue called free america and in one hand the figure holds a flag not yet unfurled and in the other she holds a length of broken chain, a powerful visual link between the chains of empire and the chains of slavery. the historical figure who made protection meaningful. the last chapter of the book called a usable past, considering this story of the apotheosis of crispus attics along with others. and shooting of michael brown in ferguson missouri in 2014. i don't argue that these events are the same as the boston massacre only that they have been occasions seen as useful to some to recall the shootings in king street in 1770.

not only in the last chapter but from start to finish, this is a book about memory, one of its most indisputable findings is that memory is unreliable. our minds deceive us about past occurrences in a variety of ways. there is also malleable, human beings and social groups with the extraordinary capacity to shake shape recollections of our own. we make memories in accordance to identity. memories are separable from narratives by weaving memories into stories to give them shape and meaning. history is a powerful corrective to the vagaries of memory by repeating our accounts of the past to verifiable claims history prevents us from straying too far of reliable accounts of what actually happened. the cast battle between history and memory from stark terms, history, he writes is the enemy of memory. the two stalk each other from across the field claiming the same terrain.

history forges weapons for what memory has forgotten or suppressed. the considerable truth in theáopposition between history and memory is certainly true memory is faulty and history could serve in the corrective to many of its errors. it's also true that history does not open a transparent window onto the pass anymore than memory does. historians too are afflicted by occlusions, distortions, omissions, and inventions. history could function as a check on the vagaries of memory but it is easy to overestimate the capacity of history to correct for inaccuracies and partial accounts of the past. in an event like the boston massacre, errors and deceptions could worm their way into the fabric of recollections when the first account is been committed to paper. the way someone witnesses the event could be distorted by

recollection of events that distort their perception of the experience. they may be tempted to warp the account provided to accord with their free conceptions preconceptions and witnesses. it could cause witnesses to modify the recollections or even falsify memories altogether. as long as historians possess only one or two historical sources to reconstruct past events, they could nurture the illusion that they know precisely what happened. multiplying the number of sources by 100 or more, the conundrums they present grow proportionately. the boston massacre was not a fabricated event, it really occurred and we know a lot about what actually happened. the point of the book and its conclusion to my talk is not to argue that we don't know for sure what happened in the past, the point instead, is to emphasize the past is always alive to us only in so far as

we could make sense of it in the present. this relationship between the past and the present is the essential connection that gives meaning to human experience. to be nurtured, celebrated, and cherished. and it's also necessarily entailing a never-ending process of modification, reassessment, and invention. the past is not fixed anymore than the future is, the past can always only and ever be what we make of it. thank you. >> talking about some of the participants in the boston massacre but by and by you left

out one of the major players. british general wolfe of montrial and quibec claimed the british 24th was undisciplined, reckless, unfocused, and had previous buildings that created problems. >> well you know, there are a lot of disparagement's of the soldiers. i mean, i guess the thing i would say about that argument is to say, and i talk at more length about the troops in town and in the book. in my opinion they were chart charged with an impossible task and accused of episodes of misbehavior and disorder and i think you could also argue that

17 months is a long time to be stationed in very difficult circumstances and hostile towns and i would say that the 14th and 29th regiment in many ways acquitted themselves pretty well. i don't say that to whitewash all soldiers behavior but you know, i would, i would sort of dissent from that argument for blaming the soldiers. >> i'm curious about that nature and presences of who the clergy in all of this, particularly the absence of those who are part of those next re-creating these stories. some sermons that had to do with david and goliath fighting over the battle in jericho. where does this fit into your

account of what was going on? >> this is a good question it's not generally a topic i take up in the book. it could have been, the sermon literature is suggestive and interesting. and i've no doubt that boston's congregations were really important, in communities of opinion forming. i think, i didn't feel like the sermon of literature available to me you know, really enhanced the story i wanted to tell particularly, so i kind of passed over it for the most part. >> right. well i mean, you know, gauge, gauge had the view that boston was a difficult town and he thought the clergy was you

know, one big part of the reason for that. but other people who-who associated with the troops did not find that to be the case and found boston to be the congregations of boston, to be relatively you know, friendly and open and open to the presence of troops. so, i think it's a difficult question to stretch clearly. >> in that picture where crispus is holding the bayonet in his left hand, he had something in his right hand. >> right. >> and i wonder is that part of a sword or a shovel or a handle? does it explain anything about the nature of the instruments?

>> the trial testimony suggested many of the towns people in the streets that night had clubs in their hand and looking at the full print you could see more of them and they are a little bit of skewered but you could see the clubs through this picture, >> you could kind of see the clubs here over here, i think this is a club flying in the air >> that one was attacking the british soldier. >> i'm sorry? >> was it crispus attacking the british soldier? >> that's clearly what the printmaker is implying and that is what andrew's testimony said at the trial. the question is whether this was accurate testimony. the trial, the testimony did suggest that there was, that

there were a lot of people in the streets that night with clubs and other weapons. not so many guns. >> so no explanation of what in his right hand? >> explanation? no it's intended to be a club. >> about john adams and the patriots rushed to put something in print and send it to print then the audience was in britain, was that audience in britain, what were they hoping to accomplish? did they think they succeeded and do you think they succeeded? >> that is a great question. i think that the town had you know, a clear intent, assembling that pam flynt was partly to consolidate the views

of the shooting you know that were held in the town. it involved a very extensive process of collecting depositions, and so i mean i think there's no question that the contents of the pamphlet and the findings of the town, if you will were pretty well understood. but they also knew that the town meeting by order of the town meeting they also knew if they circulated in town it would buy us respective jurors and therefore you know, be considered you know, tampering with the trial and so they shipped it to boston and shipped it to many people who they regarded as their political friends and allies i'm sorry i said shipped it to boston i meant shipped it to london. many allies among political leadership in london and i mean i'm sure they knew that they would circulate

eventually and it did it was circulating by midsummer well before the trial. it was a trial that happened quickly as everyone initially expected that they would in the pamphlet probably would not have been a open circulation anyway in the town prior to that point. but did it work? that is a interesting question. i think that you know, many of the claims of that pamphlet are kind of well-known to an american audience that paul revere print is well known to an american audience. but for a lot of people in-in britain you know, my guess is that it would be, that it would have been seen quite implausible particularly alongside the competing pamphlet, the unhappy disturbance pamphlet which, you know, paints a somewhat different picture. >> thank you very much.

>> american history tv continues friday in prime time. we will feature programs from our american artifacts theories which takes viewers to museums and historic sites around the country. one of our stops includes the americans exhibit at the national museum of the american indian and washington dc where curators show us how indian

names and images are used on products, military insignia, and state and city fields. we will learn the history of pocahontas and how she has been used as a symbol of america's founding. that is friday night on american history tv starting at 8:00 p.m. eastern here on c-span 3. >> the united states senate, a uniquely american instant tuition legislating and carrying out constitutional duties since 1789. >> please raise your right hand. >> on wednesday, january 2 c- span takes you inside the senate learning about the legislative body and its inner workings. we look at the history of conflict and compromise with original interviews. >> arguing about things,

picking them around and having these debates, it's thoroughly american. >> key moments in history. a unprecedented access allowing us to bring cameras into the senate chamber during a session. follow the evolution of the senate into the modern era. from advice and consent to the role in impeachment proceedings and their investigations. the senate, conflict and compromise. a c-span original production reports the history, traditions, and role of the uniquely american institution. premieres wednesday, january 2 at 8:00 p.m. eastern and pacific on c-span. be sure to go online@c-span.org and watch original full-length interviews with senators and view farewell speeches from long serving members and take a tour inside of the senate chamber, the old senate chamber

and other exclusive locations. >> american history tv continues now, with lebanon valley college professor james bruce hart teaching the class about the lead up to the american revolution describing actions by the british government such as the stamp act and stationing british troops in boston which american colonists began to view as a overreach of power, part of our lectures and history series this is just over an hour. >> all right so today we will be talking about the imperial problem that faces britain after the war in 1763 and of course, the coming of the revolution so if you have any questions pipe up if not i will be asking you questions. remember last time or last week anyway we put a graph up here showing the results you probably get if you went around