Practicing as a psychiatrist in and around Boston Chaim M. Rosenberg became interested in the abandoned nineteenth-century textile and shoe mills, the people who built them and the people who worked in them. He decided to switch from medicine to history. Among his books are The Life and Times of Francis Cabot Lowell; 1775-1817; Goods for Sale: Products and Advertising in the Massachusetts Industrial Age: America at the Fair, Chicago's 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, and Yankee Colonies Across America. His new book Losing America, Conquering India was published September 2017.
Until 1765, there were no medical schools in the American colonies. In the words of one historian, a man aspiring to the medical profession was obliged to acquire his training as an apprentice to an older doctor. Beginning usually at fifteen years of age, he took care of the physician’s office and his horse, and […]
George Washington was a colonel in the Virginia militia, master of Mount Vernon, founding father, commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, first president of the United States, and Father of his Country. The nation’s capital, many other towns and thousands of streets carry the Washington name. Yet, George Washington “was far less powerful in the tiny […]
James Craik was born in Scotland, circa 1727, on the 1,400-acre estate of his father William Craik, member of the British parliament. He attended Edinburgh medical school; the first medical school in the English-speaking world. After graduation Dr. Craik served in the British army in the West Indies. Leaving the army, he set up medical […]
On July 2, 1778, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts hanged Bathsheba Ruggles Spooner and Continental soldier Ezra Ross, together with British soldiers Sgt. James Buchanan and Pvt. William Brooks. They had been convicted of the murder of Bathsheba’s husband, Joshua Spooner, in “the most extraordinary crime ever perpetrated in New England.”[1] The trial was the first […]
Whig or Tory, which side to support in the coming Revolutionary War? Every adult in the thirteen British colonies of North America faced the task of declaring allegiance. The drama played out even among the Mayflower descendants in Plymouth, Massachusetts, the first successful British settlement in North America, which by 1775 had grown to 2,000 […]
James Henry Craig, an officer in the British army, fought in the Revolutionary War from the beginning to the end. He was at Bunker Hill, battled the Americans in Canada, assisted in the capture of Fort Ticonderoga, and negotiated the British surrender at Saratoga. In 1779, Craig took part in the British occupation of Penobscot […]
