Boston’s Massacre

My youngest brother is a historian who specializes in American colonial and Revolutionary War history. He has just published a new book, Boston’s Massacre.

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Eric is a very good writer, and the Boston Massacre gives him a fun and interesting topic. Here are excerpts from a few of the reviews:

In Boston’s Massacre, Eric Hinderaker brilliantly unpacks the creation of competing narratives around a traumatic and confusing episode of violence. With deft insight, careful research, and lucid writing, Hinderaker shows how the bloodshed in one Boston street became pivotal to making and remembering a revolution that created a nation. (Alan Taylor, author of American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750–1804)

Seldom does the book appear that compels its readers both to rethink a signal event in American history and reexamine powerful assumptions about historical knowledge itself. It’s even rarer for an author to accomplish so formidable a feat in prose of sparkling clarity and grace. But this is such a book, and Eric Hinderaker just such an author: Boston’s Massacre is a gem. (Fred Anderson, author of Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766)

Hinderaker illuminates the events of March 5, 1770, from a host of unexpected angles, from its military origins and the possibility of an additional shooter, to the Kent State comparison that thrust itself upon the nation two hundred years later. (Woody Holton, author of Abigail Adams)

Eric Hinderaker widens our understanding of the Boston Massacre and the origins of the American Revolution. By setting this stirring event in the context of New England’s involvement in Britain’s colonial wars, and by depicting the occupying British army as a social force of considerable power, this elegant book gives us a far richer account of how military occupation pushed Boston into rebellion. (Mark A. Peterson, author of The Price of Redemption: The Spiritual Economy of Puritan New England)

You can order Boston’s Massacre from Amazon.

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