Over on Facebook Group page for Courage, Paul W. Pyle aks:

I was wondering about the process you use in gathering historical facts when you start creating a great movie such as this. How you get the idea of the basic historical location and so on.

Over the years, we’ve collected quite a few primary sources for mid to late 18th century in New England.   Since our goal is to root each episode in a specific month or season of the pre-Revolutionary period, we usually start by reading all of the issues of the two period newspapers we have multiple issues for — The New Hampshire Gazette and the Providence, Rhode Gazette and Country Journal.   In the pilot episode, we looked at more or less the entire year of 1769 and 1770 and we discovered fascinating references to British soldiers, stationed in Boston and sent out into New Hampshire to look for deserters.   Since our backlot, Riley’s Farm, has a few period looking structures, but mostly cultivated farm land, we’re always on the watch for historical encounters between the “history’s main players” and the back country towns, so a patrol for deserters seemed both accurate and a compelling source for drama.

That was confirmed when we read Samuel Adam’s account of the early 1769 fracas between New Hampshire citizens and a British patrol in a book called “The Journal of Occurences.”  Adams created what some have called the first “wire service” in America, when he chronicled the encounters between British troops and Boston citizens after their arrival in 1768.     In the New Hampshire incident, the soldiers were not wearing their uniforms, while looking for deserters, so the local magistrates mistook them for common kidnappers when they apprehended their errant comrades.    That certainly seemed like an incident worth dramatizing, so it was our initiating incident.

Another of Samuel Adam’s themes, in Journal of Occurences, focused on the cultural divide between British troops and the neo-Puritan sensibilities of Boston.   He recorded, in particular, incidents of British troops making inappropriate advances on the women of the town and he exulted when officer-sponsored dinner balls ran short of New England women.   We thought an encounter between a British soldier and a New Hampshire woman might make for a good series starter and we began researching the jurisprudence of family life.  

We went to the legal papers of John Adams next to review the way in which bastardy cases proceeded through the courts and we determined there was very little incidence of children born without a father present, but the cases that did exist seemed to make a fairly good argument for why that was the precedent:   if a father could not be made to pay for his child, the expenses fell on the towship itself.   Everyone in the community had an interest in making sure mom and dad got married, or they would be taxed to pay for the indiscretion.  Shelley Kresnan was invaluable in finding details of small time justice in the colonies, in one case even digging up a rare book published in Boston in 1771 and helping us decide how to dress the justices of the peace in the general sessions court.

When it comes to specifics and manners and details, we tend to do what we call “predatory primary reading,” which means that when we encounter a primary journal that chronicles a practice we find odd, we jot it down for a future episode.   For example, when the Duke of Marbois visited Boston in 1777, he made note of an old New England tavern marm who insisted on sharing a pot of wine with him, literally, passing the vessel back and forth.   He also noted that even Boston gentry would sometimes use the table cloth itself to wipe hands and noses.   When Simeon Trapp, the governor’s attorney in the pilot episode of Courage, (played by Basil Hoffman) was snorting down a good meal, we had him take up the table cloth and wipe his face clean with it.  

 

Of course, there is a reason they call living history an “interpretation,” because any attempt to distill and summarize the past is frought with peril and troubled by the many voids we have in the record.   I shy away from academic historians for that reason, except to examine their bibliographies, because the very attempt to summarize obscures the details themselves and substitutes conclusions that may or may be supported by the primary record.   Michael A. Bellesiles comes to mind. 

Anyway, that’s a short hand answer for you.   We look forward to help from our audience too.  If you find a primary source, or an interesting first hand anecdote, send it our way!