News

Imagining the Boston Massacre

Imagining the Boston Massacre is the latest lesson in our lesson plan series Imagining the Revolution, which challenge students to go beyond obvious questions about the literal accuracy of images to consider them as valuable sources for understanding how artists and their audiences understood the events depicted.

This lesson, written for middle and high school, asks students to interpret depictions of the deadly confrontation between Bostonians and British troops on the evening of March 5, 1770, by examining engravings by Henry Pelham and Paul Revere of Boston and Jonathan Mulliken of Newburyport, Massachusetts, as well as later versions of the same image. The goals of the lesson are for students to understand the importance contemporaries attached to the event and how the event reflected and shaped colonial resistance to British authority. Seen here is the original engraving plate for Revere’s The Bloody Massacre perpetrated in King-Street Boston, on display in the Commonwealth Museum in Boston.