Why was the reenactment of the boston massacre important

Luckily, Revere had an excellent memory and produced a detailed engraving of all four sides of the obelisk. Paul Revere's engraving of all four sides of the obelisk erected on Boston Common in celebration of the repeal of the Stamp Act.

On March 5, , a mob of Bostonians harassed a lone British soldier on sentry duty at the Customs House, and when seven more British troops came to his protection, they were pelted by snowballs and stones.

In the skirmish, one of the British soldiers opened fire on the unarmed crowd without orders and more shots were fired in the chaos. When the smoke cleared, three Bostonians lay dead on the street—including a formerly enslaved Black dock worker named Crispus Attucks —and two more died later from their wounds.

They would later be eulogized as the first casualties of the American Revolution. As the British soldiers sat in jail awaiting trial, the two sides of the clash—Patriots and pro-British Tories—raced to tell their conflicting narratives of what happened on March 5.

At first, no one wanted to represent the soldiers, Bellia said, until John Adams risked his law practice for his belief that everyone deserves a fair trial. More British soldiers arrived at the scene to protect the sentry, and the crowd attacked the regiment with snowballs, rocks and coal. There are conflicting accounts of how the firing started, but five colonists ended up dead, including Crispus Attucks, an African-American. British Gov. Thomas Hutchinson finally dispersed the crowd by promising a full inquiry into the incident.

Bostonians demanded that acting royal governor Thomas Hutchinson remove all soldiers from town. Would that action keep the peace or reward mob violence? Did Hutchinson even have the authority to alter orders from London? Any choice would be fraught with consequences. This spring, modern crowds in Boston watched the discussion unfold again in a new play supported by Mass Humanities called Blood on the Snow , staged inside the same walls where the governor and his advisers debated those questions in Blood on the Snow is an experiment in combining public history and theater.

It is produced by the Bostonian Society, the nonprofit organization that maintains the Old State House, the brick building erected near the center of Boston in to house the town and provincial governments. Porter Ridge High hs Homepage. Before the reenactment took place, the class had been taught in depth about the massacre.

One part of the lesson included comparing two paintings from that era. Using a Venn diagram, students compared and contrasted two paintings from that era. One painting was from an eyewitness, while the other one, which was the example of propaganda, was from an artist who was depicting events he had not seen. The painting from the eyewitness was just as it should have been. It depicted the mob of angry Bostonians, all of which were men, surrounding the Redcoats with their makeshift weapons, as well as the legendary Crispus Attucks in the face of the British soldier.

The other painting was exaggerated. There were peaceful men, women and children, in what looked to be church clothing, being shot down by an army of redcoats. Bodies of the innocent victims lined the ground, while the Redcoats on the streets, as well as in the windows, shot them down one by one.