eraker combs through the almost 250-year-old evidence and tries to determine what really happened on that fateful day. this is about 45 minutes. >> a tangled relationship with boston. i grew up in a small town in south dakota. i first visited here as a 12-year-old when my brother was in school and the trip made an impression on me. i saw my first major league baseball game at fenway park. we walked the freedom trail. later, i lived in somerville for six years when i was working on my phd. i intended to write my first research seminar paper on boston in the era of the american revolution, but i changed my mind and chose a different topic. that topic led me to my dissertation project. ultimately, i followed a different intellectual path entirely. it has been a winding path that has led me back to boston after all. it was a pleasure to work on a boston topic for a number of reasons. unlike much of my earlier work .unlike much of my earlier work which is focused on relatively little-known characters and events, this is a place and time that immediately resonates with a lot of people. although much of my earlier work is involved with the most slender evidentiary threads, the sources for this project were so rich that at times it was overwhelming. in fact, it was the richness of the source material that led me to this project in the first place. there are over 200 eyewitness accounts relating to that evening. they are inconsistent with each other in many ways. i became curious about what it would mean to work through all that testimony systematically. the boston massacre is the most densely described events in early american history, yet paradoxically, that fact makes it surprisingly hard to say what actually happened. in the most general way, this struck me as an interesting problem of narrative and analysis. as i worked more deeply into the source materials, i became absorbed by the dilemmas the british empire faced in implementing new policies after the seven years war. one key aspect of that dilemma was the decision to post 10,000 troops to north america after 1763, which created all kinds of problems in civilian military relations. when i teach the american revolution to undergraduates, one of the points i like to make is that as americans, we all instantly identify with the embattled colonials fighting the world's superpower. but the real revolution for americans today i would argue doesn't have as my study with the colonies as it has to do with great britain, which was so similar in the late 18th century to the united states in the early 21st. a dominant world power that believed it was a force for good in the world. the correspondence of british officials dealing with the challenges of governance in the north american colonies has a familiar ring, as they agonize about the best way to balance the exercise of power with the right liberties and interests of different peoples in. addition to the very rich source material housed in the mhs and other boston repositories, this gave me the opportunity to work in depth in the papers of thomas gage, the commander in chief of british forces in north america in the 1760's and 1770's. newspapers, which reside in the clements library in the university of michigan, have one of the most astonishing troves of research materials from the 18th century in the world. they pick up 70 linear feet of shelf space. it is bound into 169 volumes with an additional 40 boxes of financial records. they give the researcher a glimpse of how difficult the task gage was assigned. this is how i described his 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, it had soldiers stationed at 37 different posts with forces ranging in size from a company of 49 to a battalion of about 350. they stretched from st. john's in newfoundland to fort butte on the lower mississippi. approximately the distance separating london from the ancient port city of the red sea, jetta. many of these posts were accessible only by long overland marches or circuitous water routes. 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 fisheries in the northeast, niagara, detroit, mackinac, occupying the chokepoint on the great lakes, the forts at opposite ends of the ohio valley that link the great lakes to the mississippi, and apalachee, pensacola, and mobile on the gold coast. -- the gulf coast. simply to take in the strategic significance of all these posts, to appreciate the ways in which climate and geography made them different form one another and to grasp how native american nations largely determined their capacity for effective action could require a lifetime of study and reflection. the challenges of managing britain's army in north america were legion, and only uncommon administrative acumen could make it work. fortunately, gage was an unusually competent administrator with an extraordinary capacity for patience and good humor, given the impossible demands of his job. from his headquarters in new york, he maintained an intricate web of correspondence with lines stretching outward to dozens of american outposts, in coming letters from the hinterland detailing the celebrity did -- detailing the dilapidated state of british fortifications, the challenges of creating diplomatic relations with dozens of american nations previously unknown to the british, and conflict between officers and merchants, among 1000 other things. at the same time, he was of necessity in close and continual contact with the treasury, the were office, and the board of trade. gage knew the north american's settlements well enough, but -- only enough where they intruded on the capacity of the empire to function. he was above all a pragmatist, a very busy pragmatist, with little patience for the sensitivity colonial radicals were beginning to display toward question of constitutional law and rights." here's a quick sampler of what a researcher finds in the gage papers. they are organized chronologically, so this might sit alongside letters to the commander in detroit or kaskaskia or pensacola. this is a letter from gage to william dalrymple. here is a letter from william to gage, written on the same day. this is typical. gage kept his letters as short as he could, written in the neat hand of one of his clerks, while his subordinates wrote long, often anguished, spilling out the complexities of the assignments. there's also a large collection of financial documents that help me track the later the british army spend money during the occupation. this is a topic i came to find fascinating. in the decision to station troops in boston beginning in fall 1768, the irresistible force of his administrative acumen ran up against the immovable object of boston's political culture. in several key respects, boston was unique among the port 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 populist. it had a republican and puritan heritage rooted in the english crises of the 17th century that gave it its own distinctive grammar and vocabulary of protest. let me read a few passages from the book, this time edited and stitched together a bit. in 1700, boston had the most robust maritime economy in british north america. only london and bristol ranked ahead of boston in the number of vessels registered in part. townspeople participated in enterprises not only as laborers but also as investors to a surprising degree. in the early 18th century, 544 of boston's adult males, perhaps 1800 overall, owned a share of at least one vessel. these images highlight boston's maritime orientation. this first map illustrates a fact well-known to you all, that boston with a peninsula that was almost an island thrust into the waters of the boston harbor and more connected to the sea than to the land. the second image shows the famous map of boston, engraved and printed in 1722 for the first time. it illustrates the way the waterfront dominated the town. primed by its mercantile activity, boston's population grew by 30% in the 1720's and 1730's, despite devastating waves of smallpox in 1721 and again in 1730. by 1740, boston had some 17,000 residents, and appeared to be entering an era of sustained population and growth, but it didn't come. instead, against all expectations, boston fell into the shadow of other ports, large and small, while the economy suffered waves of contraction. in contrast, every other port town in british north america, the population ceased to grow. boston was smaller than it was in 1770 than it was in 1740. merchants faced stiff competition from philadelphia which had a better agricultural hinterland, from new york who challenged trade with the british islands, and other ports like salem that began shipping dried fish directly to the west indies and the mediterranean and captured a growing share of the shipbuilding industry that had become important to the region's economy. this was the concept in which the boston caucus came to the for in local politics. the caucus, which envisioned itself as the vessel for local interest, sought to manage the business of town meetings. the imperial crisis of the 1760's and 1770's 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 collecting grievances. it had a distinctive voice, sometimes plaintiff, often -- oftenmes plaintiff outraged always standing on principle, that gave shape and focus to the town's collective rhetorical identity. its efforts were paralleled by other organizations that were created to shape opinion and when necessary mobilization. the merchant club, which evolved into the boston society for encouraging trade and commerce, the loyal nine which evolved into the sons of liberty, and the union club drawn from gangs of the north and south youth which made itself available to the loyal nine and the sons of liberty to provide muscle for crowd actions. by the mid-1760's, boston had achieved a greater degree of concorde and cooperation between radicals and moderates and had proceeded further in mobilizing public action against imperial intrusions than any other anglo-american town. three newspapers, the boston evening post, the boston gazette, and the massachusetts gazette served as mouthpieces for the movement giving coherent and sustained attention to radical concerns. the web of local associations meant bostonians were well-equipped to organize credit actions when it suited their purposes. it was precisely because he feared these crowd actions and because he's painfully aware of his own impotence 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, a circular letter written by the massachusetts bay assembly, and an especially provocative town meeting amped up official concern. by the time general gage was making arrangements for regiments of foot and artillery companies to land in boston, he thought it was very probable that they would be met by armed force and he organized as a military operation. as an aside, one of the things that surprised me 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 thought war was about to break out in the streets of boston between 1768 and 1775. but when the troops landed november 1, 1768, nobody shot at them. the next step was to figure out where they should stay. there is a great deal that could 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, but for tonight, i want to jump ahead to the shootings to consider what we know and talk a little bit about the effort to control the narrative. what happened was disputed from the beginning. the three boston newspapers with radical leanings ran accounts of the shootings the week after they occurred. two of those papers were especially detailed, but all three agreed on the essential elements of the story. the one loyalist paper in town, "the boston chronicle," declined to offer its own version. the accounts of the patriot newspapers contain some of the most familiar elements of the boston massacre story. they all stressed, for example, that the conflict grew out of a kind of playful taunting of the century by a few boys. they thought they were spoiling for a fight for no good reason, and the shootings came quickly without real provocation. for boston residents who had been present to witness the shootings for themselves, these newspaper accounts plus whatever word-of-mouth circulating in the neighborhoods would have been all they knew about the shootings. the boston town meeting also arranged for depositions to be taken and a pamphlet to be drafted. they were published together by the end of the month. titled "a short narrative of the horrid massacre in boston," it was intended for an english audience. it echoed the claim that soldiers were wreaking havoc, that men in front of the customhouse fired into the crowd with little provocation, and there were relatively few people in the streets before the shooting started, most of them boys. it also added a new incendiary claim that shots were fired from the window of the customhouse. it further implied that the customs commissioners and soldiers in boston had together planned and orchestrated the shootings. 96 depositions were added as an appendix to the pamphlet. they were much less coherent and the story they told, but the narrative relied on key claims by various witnesses to make its case. at the same time that local justices of the peace were taking depositions on behalf of the town, british officers began collecting their own testimony, much of it provided by soldiers . one of the customs commissioners left boston with 28 depositions, which were printed as the appendix to a second pamphlet also intended for an english audience. it stood many of the claims of the horrid massacre on their head. it was town's people, not soldiers, who were rampaging through the streets of boston in the hours before the shootings. it was townspeople who had a premeditated design to provoke violence. to that end, hundreds of people were from being the street and the crowd in front of the customhouse was assaulting the soldiers so violently that they could not help but fire. most people have engaged casually with the question of what happened that night, out with the impression that the answers are straightforward. most scholars who have written about the shootings have pieced together a version of events that act as a best narrative. to arrive at that impression, they sorted the eyewitness testimony, amplifying some witness claims while silencing others, and applying an unstated test of probability. in the process, they suppressed anomalies and smoothed out inconsistencies. in this book, i take the opposite approach. i am relatively agnostic about most of the details, though in general i believe the town was extremely disingenuous in the way it characterized the events leading up to the shootings, as the trial testimony eventually made clear. on a number of key points, it is impossible to say for sure exactly what happened. what is perhaps more interesting to hundred 50 years after the fact is to see the way narratives were constructed around the shootings. there were no impartial observers everyone had. a direct stake in the version of events that would become accepted as fact. people would be working very hard to sell the version that best appealed to their sensibilities. here is a fundamental truth about eyewitness testimony. the human mind does not simply recall everything it sees, recording an unerring and objective account of events, especially not in times of stress. instead, we pick up patches of highly subjective impressions. only through narrative, only by subsequently devising a story that threads those patches together into a meaningful pattern, do the instantaneous effects of a dramatic episode like the shootings in front of the customhouse acquire a form that can be recalled, interpreted, and argued for. in the space between first impression and coherent narrative, all kinds of considerations, both conscious and unconscious, can intervene. leading figures in boston had an enormous stake in presenting the town as an orderly place, a community of laws, and not a mobbish town as british officials had been complaining for years. the newspapers went to great lengths to imply that no townspeople offered serious provocation to the soldiers. one useful rhetorical device in making this case was to emphasize the involvement of boys, apprentices, youths. all these terms, ambiguous though they were, and find the provocations directed at the soldiers were playful and unthreatening. the soldiers had equally self-interested motives for playing of the violence of the townspeople and they had their share of vivid anecdotes with which to make their case. paul revere's famous print of the shootings amplified the impression shared by most bostonians that aggression lay with the soldiers. this print is not an accurate representation of the events. it is a rhetorical enjoyment making an argument about the soldiers and the town. officer in the foreground on the far right, stands with his sword raise giving the order to fire. the townspeople are innocent bystanders, well-dressed, mel -- well-meaning and agreed. this damage is intended to portray an illegitimate assault on innocent citizenry. intended for english audience and did not circulate until several months after printed. paul revere's engraving was available for purchase before the end of march. it does not seem to have circulated widely as boston. in boston and hung on the walls of homes, taverns, coffeehouses. gesture signunior quincy junior argued the power the print exerted on the people's imaginations. press in our houses added links to fancy and in the fervor of our zeal reason is in hazard of being lost. stole this picture. it was based on a painting by henry pelham, intended to print and circulate his own version. somehow revere got his hands on the image and beat pelham depressed. pelham's version appeared a week only two known copies survived. we know about the providence of these images because pelham road an angry letter which accused revere of damaging helen's .nterests by copying his work newspaper accounts and printed images were not the only ways in which the town of boston cultivated sense of grievance over the shootings. on march 8, town leaders organize a mass funeral for the .irst four victims samuel gray, samuel maverick, james caldwell and crispus attucks. an estimated 10,000 to 12,000 people marched in the funeral procession. it is supposed there must've been a greater number of people from town and country at the funeral of those massacred by the soldiers then were ever together on this continent on any occasion. beginning in the first anniversary of the shooting and continuing every year until the end of the war for independence, an annual funeral oration delivered by noteworthy local speakers reminded townspeople of the horrors and outrages of march 5, 1770. it grew into the most important public event in the boston . these massacre orations were fascinating occasions. the texts were published so we know pretty much what was said. in the book i devote space to analyzing those texts, and to an account of joseph warren's oration when church are occupying boston and his speech was an episode of high drama. it is a really interesting story, one i took a lot of pleasure working through the book. one officer and eight enlisted men were arrested for the shootings. captain thomas preston, who led a detachment of soldiers to help defend the century against the crowd. private hugh white, a century. corporal william whims, john carroll, james hartigan, matthew kilroy, liam mccauley, hugh montgomery and william morean. -- william warren. initially everyone expected them to be tried quickly. 7.5 months elapse before preston's trial. after another month, the eight soldiers went to trial. they were largely forgotten today. there were two more trials after that. the first consider charges against four men accused of firing from the customhouse window. a 14-year-old servant boy was tried and convicted of perjury. in the interest of time i will focus only on the second trial, for one of the eight soldiers. in the present day two names are indelibly associated with the boston massacre, john adams and crispus attucks. -- if the vote of the first episode to the trial. for most people, the only identifiable name on the list, widely remembered as the first african-american martyr of the american revolution, he is commonly presented today as a patriot hero in children's literature and textbooks. the trials of preston and his soldiers are famous largely because adams is famous. he went to great lengths to ensure -- that people would remember his role in the trails , which he considered to be a. -- considered to be heroic. in an important way they were heroic. adams emphasized it was greatly to boston's credit that 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 that boston was a community of laws, not a mobish town. sort of. the problem with this explanation is that in order to win acquittal, adams had approved boston was in fact a mobbish town. this was not an argument adams wanted to make but it was the only way to justify the soldiers' actions. precisely he goes he was caught in an impossible bind, the way he went about making the argument is interesting. he stressed the violence of the crowd while emphasizing the town 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 was a mob of strangers who have nothing to do with a solid citizenry of the town. many of these people were thoughtless and inconsiderate, old and young, sailors and landmen, negroes and a lot of mulatoes. adams made him famous. he handle five his significance to achieve a desired rhetorical effect. when the trials are over a printed account of the trials was the most accessible version of events available to subsequent readers. he was a sailor and dockworker from framingham, massachusetts. his father was an african slave, his mother an indian. he was initially misidentified. the coroner's report called in michael johnson. contemporary documents referred him simply as the mulatto. he was doubly an outsider to boston. in his closing argument adams seized on the testimony of a single witness to argue that he was to blame for the shootings. a dark skinned sailor and casual labor, he was a useful similar the outside agitators whom adams wanted to blame for the riot. the violence was instigated by "a motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes, irish teagues, and jacktars." to make his case he ignored the testimony of numerous witnesses who described the scene in detail and either failed to attucks. they focus on andrew, a young slave owned by oliver wendell who said he saw a man he thought was attucks rush forward, grab a musket and club a soldier over the head before he was shot dead. robert treat pain scoffed at the account. unless all the other witnesses were stone blind, this detail did not exist anywhere but in andrews on the brain -- andrew's own brain. adams set skepticism aside. the story of the aggression was just a detail he needed to defend the soldiers and protect boston's reputation. set upon, adams argued, by "a stout mulatto fellow whose looks were enough or terrify any person." adams placed responsibility on attucks. the jury returned its verdict in 2.5 hours. it brought manslaughter convictions against montgomery and matthew killed a kilroy. -- matthewd it will follow that the other three were killed not by the other six prisoners, but by three of them only and therefore they cannot all be found guilty of it. on the strength of this argument, six were acquitted and discharged. nine days later, montgomery and kilroy returns to court for sentencing. the normal sentence for manslaughter was death. by the 18th century it was common practice to allow for some offenders to plead the benefit of clergy and received clemency. to ensure montgomery and kilroy would not get the same consideration, they were branded on the thumb, set free shipped to new jersey to rejoin the regiment. by the 1850's, adams' version of the event was the most familiar. the lesson of attucks' supposedly roll had begun to change fundamentally. championed by an african american abolitionist in boston named william cooper knell, attucks was 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, part of the compromise of 1850, which empowered agents to recapture slaves who escaped to free states. which required local officials to cooperate in those efforts. the reality of that new law came home to bostonians in several cases of recapture in the 1850's, none more opposed than the recapture of anthony burns in 1854. after dramatic efforts to free him failed, he was escorted to the harbor where he was carried back to slavery in virginia. this is the immediate context for this print, issued in 1856. four years before the election of abraham lincoln. a context that made crispus attucks a hero. this beautiful image is a lithograph owned by the massachusetts historical society. i think it is displayed upstairs. i have not seen it yet. it is based on a drawing by william champney. the buildings are familiar from the revere prints, but it departs from the earlier images fundamentally. the print was crafted in a different era for distinctly different purposes. let's note a few of the ways he departed from revere and pelham. we have a line of soldiers firing into the crowd, but captain preston is no longer issuing the order. he has been knocked to the ground and is cowering. what a crowded it is. unlike revere's unarmed bystanders, every member of this crowd is brandishing a club and many are raised threateningly against the soldiers. the soldiers are discharging their guns in self-defense, not on the captain's orders. the most striking difference in this version of the massacre dominates the center of the scene, and african-american men has grabbed a musket by the blade and is threatening to club the soldier while the soldier is presumably just about to fire. by 1856, this man, crispus attucks, was regarded as the most important participant of the event. his reputation continued to grow through the civil war and beyond. boston activists campaigned for almost half a century for a monument to the massacre victims that would foreground attucks' involvement. the massachusetts historical society said it would glorify the actions of an unruly mob. several pages of the last chapter of my book talk about the discussion at the mhs. i will not go into more detail about it tonight. despite the views of the esteemed members of the massachusetts historical society, those mini campaign for a monument succeeded. in 1896, it was erected on the boston common. to commemorated all five victims. it was known as the attucks monument. made of granite, that feature is a 25-foot pillar with the victim stance inscribed near the top beginning with attucks. in front of the pillars stand a bronze statue called "free america." in one hand she holds a flag that is not yet unfurled. the other she holds a length of broken chain, a probable visual -- a powerful visual link between the chains of empire and the chains of slavery. attucks is a historical figure who makes the connection meaningful. the last chapter is called "a usable past." it considers the story of the apotheosis of attucks alongside others, including the cannes state shootings and the shooting of michael brown in 2016. i don't argue these events are the same as the boston massacre, only there have been occasions where it was useful to some people to recall the shootings in king street in 1770. not only in this 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. memories also are malleable. human beings have an extraordinary capacity to shape recollections to our wills. we labor incessantly to make our memories in accord with our sins of identity and purpose. memories are inseparable from narrative only by weaving into stories that we can give shape and meaning. history is a powerful corrective to the vagaries of memory. by pending our accounts the verifiable claims grounded in primary sources, history prevents us from straying too far from reliable accounts of what actually happened. richard white has cast the battle between history and memory in especially stark terms. history is the enemy of memory. they stock each other across the fields of the past, claiming the same terrain. history forges weapons from what memory has forgotten or suppressed. this considerable truth in the stark opposition between history and memory, it is true that memory is faulty and history can serve as a corrective to the errors. it is true that history does not open a transparent window onto the past any more than memory does. historians are afflicted by occlusions, distortions, omissions and inventions. history can 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 for inaccuracies and partial accounts of the past. in an event like the boston massacre errors and deceptions can worm their way into the fabric of recollections before the first account was committed to paper. the way witnesses receive the event could be distorted by the expectations and assumptions that shape their experience. even if witnesses' perceptions are clear, from a warp the account to record with their preconceptions and wishes. social pressures can cause witnesses to subtly modify the recollections, or even falsify the memories altogether. as long as historians possess only one or two historical sources, they can nurture the illusion they know precisely what happened. multiply the number of sources by 100 or more and the conundrum they present grows proportionately. the boston massacre was not a fabricated event. it really occurred and we know a lot about what actually happened. the point of this book in this conclusion to my talk is not to argue we never know for sure what happened in the past. the point is to emphasize that the past is always alive to us only in so far as we can 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. it is to be nurtured, celebrated and cherished. it also necessarily entails a never ending process of modification, preassessment, and invention. the past is not fixed any more than the future. the past can always only and never be what we make of it. thank you. [applause] >> [indiscernible] >> he talk about some participants in the boston massacre. to my eye you left out one of the major players, british general wolfe of montreal and quebec. declaimed the british 24th was undisciplined, reckless, roguish, and at previous billetings had created problems. prof. hinderaker: there are a lot of disparagement of the soldiers. the thing that i would say about say -- iment is to talk at more length about the troops in town in the book. in my opinion they were charged with an impossible task. they were accused of episodes of misbehavior and disorder, but on balance i think you could argue 17 months was a long time to be stationed in very difficult circumstances in a hostile town. i would say the 14th and 29th regiments acquitted themselves pretty well. i don't say that to whitewash the soldiers behavior, but i would sort of dissent from that strong argument for blaming the soldiers. >> i am curious about the nature and presence of the clergy in all of this. particularly the absence of congregations who were a part of what happened next and were re-creating the story that the -- that they understood happened that day. -- some of thes sermons that had to do a david and goliath and the battle of jericho. where does that fit into your sense of what was going on? prof. hinderaker: that's a good question and not a topic and take up in the book. it could have been -- the literature is suggestive and interesting. i have no doubt that boston's congregations were really important communities of opinion forming. i did not feel like the sermon literature available to me really enhanced the story i wanted to tell. i passed over it for the most part. >> the view of the clergy in particular. prof. hinderaker: well, gage have a view that boston was a difficult town and the clergy was one big part of the reason for that. other people who are associated with the troops did not find that to be the case. they found boston -- the congregations of boston to be relatively friendly and open and open to the presence of troops. i think it is a difficult question to judge clearly. >> in that picture where crispus is holding the bayonet in his left hand he had something in his right hand. is that part of a sword? prof. hinderaker: it is a club. >> does it explain about the nature of the incident? prof. hinderaker: the trial testimony suggested that many of the townspeople in the streets that i had clubs in their hands. if you look at the full print, you can see more of them. they are a little of scared but you can see raised clubs in the picture. >> it looks like he's holding an umbrella or something. prof. hinderaker: back here you can see clubs. i think this is a club flying in the air. >> crispus was attacking the british? prof. hinderaker: that is clearly what the printmaker is implying. that is what andrew's testimony said at the trial. the question is whether that was accurate testimony. the trial testimony did suggest that there were a lot of people in the streets that night with clubs and other weapons. cutlass is. not so many guns. >> there is no explanation of what is in his right hand? prof. hinderaker: explanation? it is intended to be a club. >> can you talk about john adams and of the patriots rushing to put something in print? the audience was in britain. was that audience in britain -- what were they hoping to accomplish? did they think they succeeded? did you think they succeeded? prof. hinderaker: that's a great question. the town had a clear intent. assembling the pamphlet was intended partly to consolidate the views of the shooting that were held in the town. involved very extensive process of collecting depositions. i think there is no question the contents of the pamphlet, the findings of the town were pretty well understood. they also knew the town meeting -- it was printed by order of the town meeting. they knew if it was circulated in town, it would bias prospective jurors and be considered tampering with the trial. they shipped it to boston and people they regarded as friends and allies -- i meant shipped it to london. to many allies among the political leadership in london. i'm sure they knew it would circulate eventually, and it did. it was circulating well before the trials. if the trial to happen quickly as everybody initially expected they would, the pamphlet probably would not have been in urban circulation in the town prior to that point. did it work? that's an interesting question. i think that, you know, many of the claims of that pamphlet are kind of well-known to and american audience of paul revere printed well-known to an american audience. for a lot of people in britain, my guess is it would have been seen as implausible. particularly alongside the competing pamphlet, the "unhappy disturbance" pamphlet that paints a different picture. >> thank you very much. [indiscernible] [applause] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2018] >> you are watching american history tv. 48 hours of programming on american history every weekend on c-span3. follow us on twitter for information on our schedule and keep up with latest history news. >> when the new congress takes office in january it will have the youngest, most diverse freshman class in recent history . new congress, new leaders. live on c-span starting january 3. next on the civil war, public the storiesxplore of women who defied cultural norms to become civil war soldiers. they describe women's wartime work as the kansas city public library hosted this hour and 15 minute talk. >> welcome. welcome, everyone. i manage the missouri valley special collection. the local and regional history department of the kansas c

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