History Lovers! This book club is for you! Each season we select a book for our first meeting to read together that covers a theme or time period of history. For our second session, the group reads from a list of books on the same topic to delve further into the theme.
For September and October, the group will meet Monday, October 3 and Monday, October 24 at 7 pm.
For September’s meeting the group will read The Boston Massacre: A Family History by Serena R. Zabin. For October’s meeting we will read from a list of books about the Revolutionary period.
You can register and pick up a copy of The Boston Massacre: A Family History at the Reference Desk. For more information and to get the zoom link to participate in the discussions via Zoom, email Mary Bear Shannon at shannon@haverfordlibrary.org.
About Boston Massacre:
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.
