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EVERAL years before I retired in i990, the history club at Oakland S University conducted a contest to select an inscription for T-shirts to be sold in a money-raising venture. The winner-"Old Historians Never Die, They Just Become Primary Sources"-brought a chuckle to the several near-septuagenarians in the department and started me thinking about what had happened to the study of colonial history during my career. After World War II took me out of college for five years, the G. I. Bill motivated me to complete my undergraduate degree at Eastern Nazarene College and to test the waters of graduate study. When in 1947 I took my first graduate class at Boston University, few manuscripts were accessible on microfilm, Xerography and interlibrary loan were years away, the great modern editorial projects had yet to publish their first volumes, Early American Imprints was only a gleam in Clifford K. Shipton's eyes, and no paperbacks on colonial history with those wonderful bibliographies were available to ease the labors of future students. I well remember copying seemingly endless manuscripts by hand at the Massachusetts Historical Society, where it was rumored the aristocratic director would expel any researcher who loosened a tie or removed a jacket on even the warmest August day (a rumor, if ever true, that was soon dispelled by the graciousness of new director Stephen Riley). To use the priceless Adams Family Papers stored at the society required personal permission from a surviving member of the family. By contrast, thirty years later, when I undertook to write a short biography of Abigail Adams, I could assemble in my study copies of all her known letters in one form or another: newly published and fully annotated editions, microfilm of those not yet published, and Xerox copies of those not at the MHS. In the Early American Imprints I could read in my new state university's library many of the same books Abigail had read. And in colonial newspapers on microcards I could follow the weekly news of her time. Whenever I muse on my life in history, my appreciation grows for the great editors of my generation who have given us the modern editions of Franklin, Jefferson, the Adamses, and others. Above all, I stand in amazement at Ted Shipton's accomplishment of his "mission impossible," the Early American Imprints and the newspapers in microprint. I. give hearty assent to Edmund S. Morgan's recent conclusion that Shipton "probably did more for the study of early American history than all the professors who have taught the subject."1

IN late summer I765, as Boston began to resist the Stamp Act, the prominent merchant Richard Clarke sat uneasily under the whiggish preaching of Jonathan Mayhew at the West Church. On August 25 Mayhew delivered a sermon which even he admitted had been "composed in a high strain of liberty." Clarke, among others, believed that this sermon helped to incite the riot that destroyed Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson's mansion on the following day. Refusing to hear his pastor's profuse expressions of regret, Clarke angrily withdrew his family from the congregation.' One might expect Clarke to have found a new spiritual home in one of the town's three Anglican churches, for instance at King's Chapel, the rector of which characterized Mayhew's composition as "one of the most seditious Sermons ever delivered." Instead, he took a pew at the Brattle Street Congregational Church. Here, without fear of contaminating his family with disturbing political or religious doctrines, he could listen to the soothing preaching of Dr. Samuel Cooper, in the company of such whig leaders as John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Dr. Joseph Warren, and, from time to time, John Adams. Apparently pleased with his choice, Clarke remained in this congregation until he became a loyalist exile in I775. As late as I773, only a short time before he stubbornly supported Britain in the tea crisis, he purchased an expensive pew in the handsome new meetinghouse just erected by this affluent congregation.2