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One of the hot historical phrases of the past decade has been “the Atlantic world.” This is shorthand for recognizing that the histories of the countries that surround the Atlantic Ocean are greatly intertwined. People not only moved (or were moved) across national borders, but in the Age of Empire those borders encompassed a lot more territory.

Col. Thomas Goldthwaite (1717-1799, thumbnail image courtesy of the Maine Memory Network) was the militia colonel in charge of Fort Pownall, guarding Penobscot Bay in Maine. He was also a major landowner in that region, and his son ran a trading-post near the mouth of the Kenduskeag.In April 1775, Goldthwaite surrendered the cannons in Fort Pownall to a British naval vessel.

AP - Election Day will be something of an afterthought for tens of millions of Americans ™ they’ll be voting well ahead of time. In fact, six weeks out from Election Day, some voters in Kentucky, South Carolina and Virginia already are done.

I’ve discussed the length of Judge Richard Stockton’s imprisonment by the British in 1776-77 (about two and a half months, tops), and what his family left out of their telling of the story in the 1820s (that he’d accepted the British commanders’ amnesty and dropped out of the Revolutionary struggle).

So what do documents from 1776 and 1777 tell us about Richard Stockton, signer of the Declaration of Independence, and what he experienced as a British captive? How might those primary sources help to explain the discrepancies between what his family and friends said about him when he died in 1781

In June 1776, the New Jersey convention elected Richard Stockton (1730-1781) as a delegate to the Continental Congress. He was one of the colony’s leading attorneys, and under the Crown had received appointments to the governor’s Council and the high court.Stockton arrived in Philadelphia in time to take part in the debate about independence.

Yesterday I described carpenter John Nutting’s decision in September 1774 to leave Cambridge, where he had been born in 1740, and take refuge in Boston, under the protection of the British troops. Soon afterwards, he brought his wife and several children into Boston, too.Many of those troops needed barracks.

This is the anniversary of the Powder Alarm, the brief uprising of New England militiamen in 1774 that presaged the Battle of Lexington and Concord the following April. One of the men caught up in that event was John Nutting (1740-1800), a Cambridge carpenter and militia officer.

Since March I’ve been meaning to finish the story of Dr. Samuel Gelston, the Nantucket physician whom the Patriots jailed in January 1776, and then had to recapture the next month when he escaped.In the summer of 1776, Gelston was still in custody, guarded by Berachiah Basset on Naushon Island, the biggest of the Elizabeth Islands off Cape Cod.

Clinton urges her loyalists to back Obama - Boston Globe August 26, 2008 – 9:07 am Boston Globe Clinton urges her loyalists to back Obama Boston Globe - 51 minutes ago Some loyal to Hillary Clinton have been disappointed over the diminished role of her delegates at the convention.