When it comes to the events surrounding the American revolution and the birth of the nation, there are signposts that most of us learned as children. There is the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, the midnight ride of Paul Revere, Lexington and Concord, Bunker Hill, “Give me liberty, or give me death,” The Declaration of Independence, and “I have not yet begun to fight.”

If you study this time with a little more depth, things like the Stamp Act and Townsend Act and the Intolerable Acts, designed by the British Parliament to raise revenue and reign in the increasingly rebellious American colonies, help explain the increased tension between both sides of the conflict. But there is one event which fails to garner the importance it deserves, and while written on and understood by historians, has failed to rise to the level of the other signpost moments in pop culture, and that is the burning of the HMS Gaspee in 1772.

Music by: Andrii Poradovskyi (lNPLUSMUSIC – Pixabay)

Show Notes: www.rootsoftoday.blog

Further Reading

Staples, William R. The Documentary History of the Destruction of the Gaspee. Providence: Knowles, Vose & Anthony, 1845; republished 1990.

Park, Steven. The Burning of His Majesty’s Schooner Gaspee: An Attack on Crown Rule Before the American Revolution. Yardley, PA: Westholme Publishing, 2016.

“The 250th Anniversary of the Burning of the Gaspee,” America250.org

Bartlett, John Russell. A History of the Destruction of His Britannic Majesty’s Schooner Gaspee … Narragansett Bay, on the 10th of June 1772. Providence: A. Crawford Greene, 1861.