Old State House

This guide to the Old State House in Boston follows one balcony through two very different moments: the Boston Massacre in the square below on March 5, 1770, and a scene six years later when a colonel climbed those same steps to address the crowd. Inside the building, in 1761, a lawyer named James Otis argued so fiercely against British search warrants that John Adams later credited the moment as the birth of American independence. Paul Revere, a silversmith and engraver, turned the massacre scene into a print that spread through the colonies.