Editorial

Abstract

J WINSLOW, James Lovell, and Vida Scudder; if not Lowells, Cabots, and Lodges, these persons are still redolent of “Old Boston” and are used to explore topics familiar to readers of the Quarterly. As prisms for seeing the evolution of Boston’s, New England’s, and, ultimately, America’s history, our essays use biography to present new perspectives on their respective historical times. While Luke’s parable (5:37–39 KJV) cautions us against putting new wine in old wineskins, Rabbi Yose ben Yehuda in the Pirkei Avot reiterates the axiomatic wisdom for the student of history: “he who learns from the old, . . . he can be compared to one who eats ripe grapes and drinks old wine” (4:20). Each of our authors in this issue provides us with ripe grapes and vintage wine for our reflections. Stuart M. McManus in “Late-Humanism and Revolutionary Eloquence” examines the intellectual and rhetorical traditions that inform James Lovell’s inaugural Boston Massacre Oration. McManus uses an examination of James Lovell’s Classical and Renaissance education in his Harvard classes to understand better the oration’s secular but ritualistic and ceremonial intent as well as the form and structure of revolutionary and patriotic speeches. In doing so, he presents us with a more nuanced understanding of the rhetorical devices in Lovell’s texts, new interpretations of its form and structure and of the sources that described presentation of the speech, and suggestions of how the future rituals of Fourth of July speeches came to be shaped. Robert J. Wilson III shares his discovery of two hitherto unknown letters by Joshua Winslow written to Jotham Gay in 1773 in “We Were Declared Enemies to the Country.” Demonstrating the now familiar transatlantic context in which