A little after 9:00 p.m. on March 5, 1770, a detachment of British soldiers fired into a crowd of townspeople on King Street in Boston, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The result—the “Boston Massacre”—has echoed through the pages of newspapers, pamphlets, and history books ever since. It is perhaps the most densely described incident in early American history (with more than two hundred eyewitness accounts), yet the descriptions are sufficiently contradictory to make the unfolding sequence of events surprisingly hard to pin down. To say what happened would seem to be a straightforward task, but in many ways the Boston Massacre remains an irreducible mystery.
The human mind does not simply recall everything it sees, recording an objective and unerring account of events as they happen. Instead, in moments of stress, it picks up patches of highly subjective impressions. Only through narrative—only by subsequently devising a story that threads those patches together into a meaningful pattern—do the instantaneous effects of a dramatic episode like the shootings in King Street acquire a form that can be recalled, interpreted, and argued for. The Boston Massacre offers an unusual opportunity to observe impressionistic flashes gradually take on the shape of competing narratives, and then to trace the evolution of those narratives across a long span of time.
