madtomedgar:

ciceroprofacto:

teddybearparker:

The average age in Boston in the early 1770s was 14. More than half the population of Boston was under 21 in the events leading up to the American Revolution.

It really puts everything into a completely different context, doesn’t it?

idk.  Seems like things turned out pretty well in the end.

A large part of the reason for the population of Massachusetts being especially young in the 1760s and 70s is that somewhere between 1/10 and 1/13 of the male population of Massachusetts died in the seven years war. There had also been a smallpox outbreak in the 1760s, and a large chunk of Boston had burned to the ground. One of the interesting things that this actually leads to is a serious decline in the taxable population, which placed a higher tax burden on those left, which made them more likely to default, futher shrinking the taxable population, etc. This actually does help explain why the backlash to Britain’s new taxes was so strong. People already couldn’t keep up with the burden of local and provincial taxes. Imperial taxes just weren’t a reasonable thing to ask.