The Boston Massacre, Serena Zabin
The Boston Massacre, Serena Zabin
1 Rating(s)
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

The Boston Massacre
A Family History

Author: Serena Zabin

Narrator: Andrea Gallo

Unabridged: 8 hr 40 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 02/18/2020

Categories: Nonfiction, History


Synopsis

A dramatic untold ‘people’s history’ of the storied event that helped trigger the American Revolution

The story of the Boston Massacre—when on a late winter evening in 1770, British soldiers shot five local men to death—is familiar to generations. But from the very beginning, many accounts have obscured a fascinating truth: the Massacre arose from conflicts that were as personal as they were political.

Professor Serena Zabin draws on original sources and lively stories to follow British troops as they are dispatched from Ireland to Boston in 1768 to subdue the increasingly rebellious colonists. And she reveals a forgotten world hidden in plain sight: the many regimental wives and children who accompanied these armies. We see these families jostling with Bostonians for living space, finding common cause in the search for a lost child, trading barbs and and sharing baptisms. Becoming, in other words, neighbors. When soldiers shot unarmed citizens in the street, it was these intensely human, now broken bonds that fueled what quickly became a bitterly fought American Revolution.

Serena Zabin’s The Boston Massacre delivers an indelible new slant on iconic American Revolutionary history.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Shadira on September 10, 2020

Historians continue to assess the meaning of the American Revolution. But at first glance, what can one possibly say about the Boston Massacre that is new? The iconic event, immortalized 250 years ago in a famous engraving by Paul Revere, has been studied and written about exhaustively. The facts ar......more

Goodreads review by Books on Stereo on February 24, 2020

A revelatory look at the events leading up to the American Revolution, but ultimately is forgettable by the end. The narrative lacks focus and feels jumbled a lot of the time. Zabin clearly writes with deep empathy for this time period, but the lofty promises that are set forth in the prologue/prefa......more

Goodreads review by Gary on February 12, 2020

The author of “The Boston Massacre: A Family History” presents an interesting thesis, that the amount of social interaction between the occupying British troops and American colonists turned the so-called “Boston Massacre” and the later Revolutionary War into “family conflicts”. According to the desc......more

Goodreads review by Darcia on June 26, 2021

I love when an author shows me the humanity behind a historical event, and Serena Zabin does just that with The Boston Massacre. Having grown up in Massachusetts, the Boston Massacre was taught and talked about, but always as a lead-in to the Revolutionary War. We knew it happened, though we never re......more