Profs & Pints Baltimore: The Boston Massacre’s Backstory

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “The Boston Massacre’s Backstory,” a look at the hidden history of an event that you probably heard mythologized in school, with Richard Bell, professor of history at the University of Maryland at College Park.

[Doors open at 3. The talk starts at 4:30. The room is open seating.]

Everyone knows something about the Boston Massacre: the snowy night, the redcoat soldiers lined up like a firing squad, the helpless civilians lying in heaps in front of them. Five people were killed that night—March 5, 1770—and their deaths at the hands of the British military is a grim and well-known milestone on the road to the American Revolution.

But most of what we think we know is wrong, the product of layers of myth and centuries of distortion. 

What went down that night on King Street was nothing like the frozen cartoon lineup we’ve seen in…