157. Finding the Hidden Families behind the Boston Massacre with Serena Zabin

On the evening of March 5, 1770, Captain Thomas Preston and a small contingent of British Redcoats under his command fired into a crowd of civilians massing on King Street in Boston, killing several people.

Many of us are familiar with Paul Revere’s famous engraving of what he called “the Bloody Massacre,” what we now know as “the Boston Massacre.”

But Revere’s depiction of the incident obscures much more than it reveals about the thousands of connections between Bostonians and the British Army in the years before the American Revolution.

On today's episode, we're pleased to bring you the audio version of Jim Ambuske's recent live stream conversation with Dr. Serena Zabin, professor of history at Carleton College. Zabin is the author of the new book, The Boston Massacre: A Family History.

About Our Guest:

Serena Zabin is a professor of early America and director of the program in American Studies at Carleton College in Northfield, MN. She received degrees from Bowdoin College, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Professor Zabin’s newest work, The Boston Massacre: A Family History, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in February 2020.

About Our Host:

Jim Ambuske, Ph.D. leads the Center for Digital History at the Washington Library. A historian of the American Revolution, Scotland, and the British Atlantic World, Ambuske graduated from the University of Virginia in 2016. He is a former Farmer Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities at the University of Virginia Law Library. At UVA Law, Ambuske co-directed the 1828 Catalogue Project and the Scottish Court of Session Project.  He is currently at work on a book about emigration from Scotland in the era of the American Revolution as well as a chapter on Scottish loyalism during the American Revolution for a volume to be published by the University of Edinburgh Press.