There's an ugly civil war side to revolutionary Boston that we don't often talk about and a lot of thuggish, vigilante behavior by groups like the Sons of Liberty.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Many of us came away from our youth thinking that the story of the Revolution was that the Americans were patriots fighting the oppressive British. It was kind of good versus evil, liberty versus tyranny. When you get into it, you find that it was much more complicated.
New York is about success. Boston is about resentment.
The defense of the revolution is the defense of the people.
In the 1990s, we introduced Boston's community policing strategy. We reversed the tide of violent crime that threatened our city, and we established a national model for preventing and fighting crime.
Revolution did not necessarily involve sanguinary strife. It was not a cult of bomb and pistol. They may sometimes be mere means for its achievement.
You can kill a revolutionary but you can never kill the revolution.
The American Revolution was, in fact, a battle against the philosophy of Locke and the English utilitarians.
What was the American Revolution? The people who joined to carry it out had different views of what they had done.
While the struggle for religious liberty had proceeded without large-scale bloodshed in New England and elsewhere in the United States, the struggle for political liberty had not fared so well.
Every war has revolutionary justice.