Profs and Pints Online presents: “The Boston Massacre’s Backstory,” a look at the hidden history of an event that you probably heard mythologized in school, with Richard Bell, professor of history at the University of Maryland at College Park.

[This talk will remain available in recorded form at the link given here for tickets and access.]

Everyone knows something about the Boston Massacre: the snowy night, the redcoat soldiers lined up like a firing squad, the helpless civilians lying in heaps in front of them. Five people were killed that night—March 5, 1770—and their deaths at the hands of the British military is a grim and well-known milestone on the road to the American Revolution.

But most of what we think we know is wrong, the product of layers of myth and centuries of distortion. What went down that night on King Street was nothing like the frozen cartoon lineup we’ve seen in textbooks a thousand times. The true story of the Boston Massacre was messier and darker and filled with the sort of class and race divisions that often get whitewashed out of the popular mythology of the Revolution.

It began two years earlier when the troops first arrived to turn Boston into an occupied town. Some of those redcoats would make friends in Boston and marry local women. Others would make sworn enemies. The tensions between soldiers and civilians built slowly—one drunken argument at a time—until the powder keg was primed and ready to explode.

It took weeks and months for everyone to figure out what had happened that night. In its aftermath, both soldiers and civilians began trying to assign meaning to this tragic loss of local life—and to give it a name. The official British report called it an “unhappy disturbance,” but Boston leaders took to calling it the “horrid massacre.”

You’ll love watching the 1770 Boston Massacre explored from all its many sides by University of Maryland historian Richard Bell, whose electric speaking style has earned him a large Profs and Pints audience following. Drawing on the latest scholarship, he’ll convince you that the backstory of the “affray on King Street” makes it far more fascinating than Paul Revere’s famous engraving of it has led us to believe.

Profs & Pints Online: The Boston Massacre’s Backstory