Powder House Day

Powder House Day commemorates the events of April 22, 1775, when Captain Benedict Arnold and his foot brigade demanded the keys to New Haven's city powder house, so that they might arm themselves and head down to Massachusetts to join the bloody fray of the American Revolution. 

The Minutemen and Their World – Robert A. Gross

In 1977, this book won the prestigious Bancroft Prize, given for histories about the Americas. From the viewpoint of social history, Robert A. Gross (UConn) analyzes the effects of the American Revolution on Concord, Massachusetts. Gross makes clear how the coercive acts of Parliament in 1774 exacerbated pre-existing social and economic problems.

Before the coercive acts, Concordians paid little attention to the outside world. They had faith in their local government, which was run by local potentates who owned roughly twice as much land as ordinary people. When the Crown replaced the locally-elected town council with a Crown-appointed institution, their politics changed quickly from loyalists to “rabble in arms.” Feeding this radicalism, however, were district loyalties and religious differences, a legacy of the Great Awakening in the 1730s.

The farmers, artisans, and other people of Concord knew that their community was in trouble. People had large numbers of kids so population pressure on the land made it impossible for fathers to pass land and livings down to sons and dowries to their daughters. Unable to make a living, sons could not marry and were encouraged by their parents to start farms in New Hampshire and Vermont. This loosened traditional ties and patriarchal control that bound people all the way back to the Puritans.

The best thing about this book is that if focusses on ordinary women, blacks, artisans, spinsters, the poor, and the substantial citizens. People formed and supported militias, through terrible economic hardship by the war’s end, not because they wanted a revolution, but because they wanted to struggle against social forces and preserve a world that offered opportunity, a world they feared was vanishing.  It is a perfect illustration of the quotation by Sicilian author Giuseppe di Lampedusa: “If you want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”