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Exhibit Sources

Images

 

All images are listed in the order they appear on their respective web pages.

Patriot, Hero, Distracted Person Landing Page

Portrait of James Otis, 1755
Joseph Blackburn
2017.148.1AB
Courtesy of Historic New England
Gift in memory of Gertrude and Carlos Hepp

 

 

Personal Life: Family & Foundations

 

Otis Coat of Arms
Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

 

John Adams, 1792-1793
John Trumbull
White House Historical Association (White House Collection)

 

Samuel Adams, ca. 1765-1896
J. B. Longacre 
New York Public Library Digital Collections

 

Mr. James Otis, ca. 1760
John Singleton Copley
American, 1738-1815
Oil on canvas
M86.50
Wichita Art Museum, Roland P. Murdock Collection

 

Mercy Otis Warren, ca. 1800
From the New York Public Library

 

Samuel Allyne Otis, ca. 1811
Gilbert Stuart
1980.11.2
National Gallery of Art
Gift of the Honorable and Mrs. Robert H. Thayer

 

Grave of Joseph Otis, ca. 1810
Photo by Lucy Pollock

 

Portrait of Ruth Cunningham Otis, 1755
Joseph Blackburn
2017.148.2AB
Courtesy of Historic New England
Gift in memory of Gertrude and Carlos Hepp

 

Map of Andover, 1852
Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division

 

Political Life: Dissent & Democracy

 

Otis Arguing the Writs of Assistance, 1901
Robert Reid
Commonwealth of Massachusetts, State House Art Commission
Photo by Kate LaPine

 

Southwest view of the Old State House, 1791
Samuel Hill
1969.0024
Collection of Revolutionary Spaces

 

The Rights of the British Colonies, Asserted and Proved, 1764
James Otis, Esq.

 

The Repeal or the Funeral of Miss Americ-Stamp, 1766
23.42
Gift of Walter L. Goldberg, 1923
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Emotional Life: Anger & Agitation

 

A Prospect of the Colledges in Cambridge, New England, 1726
John Harris after William Burgis
Courtesy Massachusetts Historical Society 

 

 

James Otis, Distracted Person
 

Interior of a coffeehouse, ca. 1690-1700
19,310,613.20
© The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.


The Boston Gazette and Country Journal (detail), 1769
Edes and Gill
Courtesy Massachusetts Historical Society

 

Walking Stick, 1774
2003.285.a
Cleveland Museum of Art

 

The Bloody Massacre, 1770
Charles Goodspeed after Paul Revere
1908.00007
Collection of Revolutionary Spaces

 

Probate record of James Otis, 1771
Case number 15034
Suffolk County Probate and Family Court Department

 

Portrait of James Otis, 1755
Joseph Blackburn
2017.148.1AB
Courtesy of Historic New England
Gift in memory of Gertrude and Carlos Hepp

 

 

Loss of Estate: Guardianship and “Boarding Out”

 

Portrait of Ruth Cunningham Otis, 1755
Joseph Blackburn
2017.148.2AB
Courtesy of Historic New England

 

A Plan of the Bay and Harbor of Boston (detail, Hingham), ca. 1775
Wheeler and Grant
G3762.B6P5 1775 .W5
Library of Congress Geography and Map Division

 

Last Residence of James Otis, ca. 1765-1888
From the New York Public Library

 

Last Will and Testament of James Otis, 1783
Case number 17966
Suffolk County Probate and Family Court Department

 

 

Loss of Ease: Toil, Confinement & Isolation

 

Memorial marking the Otis homestead in Barnstable
Lucy Pollock photo

 

Mr. James Otis, ca. 1760
John Singleton Copley
American, 1738-1815
Oil on canvas
M86.50
Wichita Art Museum, Roland P. Murdock Collection

 

Loss of Health: Emotional Volatility & Alcohol Abuse

 

Walking Stick, 1774
2003.285.a
Cleveland Museum of Art

 

Wine bottle, ca. 1760
33.71.1
Bequest of Margaret N. Breck Stone, in memory of the Hall-Mansfield families of New Haven, Connecticut, 1932
The Metropolitan Museum of Art


 

Loss of Applause: Infamy & Disgrace

Portrait of Thomas Hutchinson (detail), ca. 1901 
Robert Reid
1956.0011
Collection of Revolutionary Spaces

 

Southwest view of the Old State House, 1791
Samuel Hill
1969.0024
Collection of Revolutionary Spaces


 

Loss of (Previous) Life

Osgood Farm, 1975
©Andover Center for History and Culture, Massachusetts


Grave of James Otis, Jr.
Photo by Lucy Pollock


 

Making a Patriot

 

Portrait of James Otis, 1755
Joseph Blackburn
2017.148.1AB
Courtesy of Historic New England
Gift in memory of Gertrude and Carlos Hepp

 

Twelve proposed amendments to the U.S. Constitution, 1789
James Madison, William Lambert
Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

 

Mercy Otis Warren, ca. 1800
From the New York Public Library

 

Portrait of Thomas Hutchinson (detail), ca. 1901 
Robert Reid
1956.0011
Collection of Revolutionary Spaces


John Adams, 1792-1793
John Trumbull

White House Historical Association (White House Collection)

Bibliography

Abbott, Charlotte. “The Osgood Family of Andover.” Memorial Hall Library. https://mhl.org/sites/default/files/files/Abbott/Osgood%20Family.pdf.

 

Adair, Douglass and John A. Schutz, eds. Peter Oliver’s Origin & Progress of the American Rebellion: A Tory View. Stanford University Press, 1961.

Adams, Charles Francis. The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States, vol. 10. Little, Brown & Co., 1856.

 

Adams, John. John Adams diary 11. Adams Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society. https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=D11&bc=%2Fdigitaladams%2Farchive%2Fbrowse%2Fdiaries_by_number.php.
 

Adams, John. John Adams diary 15. Adams Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society. https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=D15&bc=%2Fdigitaladams%2Farchive%2Fbrowse%2Fdiaries_by_number.php.

 

Adams, John. John Adams diary 16. Adams Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society. https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=D16&bc=%2Fdigitaladams%2Farchive%2Fbrowse%2Fdiaries_by_number.php.

 

American Antiquarian Society. “Additions to Thomas Hutchinson’s ‘History of Massachusetts Bay.’” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 1949. https://www.americanantiquarian.org/proceedings/44807181.pdf
 

Bailey, Sarah Loring. Historical sketches of Andover, (comprising the present towns of North Andover and Andover). Houghton, 1880. https://archive.org/details/historicalsketch00bail.

 

Bell, J. L. “Otis and Robinson Continue Their Fight in the Newspapers.” Boston 1775 blog. Accessed August 28, 2025.
https://boston1775.blogspot.com/2019/12/otis-and-robinson-continue-their-fight.html.

 

Colonial Society of Massachusetts. The Papers of Francis Bernard, Governor of Colonial Massachusetts, 1760-69, volume I: 1759-1763. The Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 2007. https://www.colonialsociety.org/node/2068.
 

Colonial Society of Massachusetts. The Correspondence of Thomas Hutchinson, Volume 1: 1740-1766. The Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 2014. https://www.colonialsociety.org/node/2507.
 

Colonial Society of Massachusetts. The Correspondence of Thomas Hutchinson, Volume 4: November 1770–June 1772. The Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 2022. https://www.colonialsociety.org/publications/4745/volume-95-correspondence-thomas-hutchinson-volume-4-november-1770-june-1772.
 

Digital History. “Toward Revolution” Accessed June 18, 2025. https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=11&psid=3793.

 

Dodd, W. F. “The First State Constitutional Conventions, 1776-1783.” The American Political Science Review 2, no. 4 (1908). https://doi.org/10.2307/1944479.

 

Ferguson, James R. “Reason in Madness: The Political Thought of James Otis.” The William and Mary Quarterly 36, no. 2 (1979): 194–214. https://doi.org/10.2307/1922264.

 

Guild, Benjamin. Diaries of Benjamin Guild, 1776, 1778. HUG 1439.5 Harvard University Archives. https://fromthepage.com/harvardlibrary/colonial-north-america-harvard-university-archives/guild-benjamin-1749-1792-diaries-of-benjamin-guild-1776-1778-hug-1439-5-harvard-university-archives.
 

Hacker, Jeffrey H. Minds & Hearts: The Story of James Otis Jr. and Mercy Otis Warren. Bright Leaf, 2021.
 

Holland, Gerald. “Lightning Bolt of Liberty: The Legacy of James Otis and His Role as a Pre-Revolutionist.” PhD diss., 2025. Liberty University. Digital Commons.

 

Hutchinson, Thomas. The history of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, from 1749 to 1774, comprising a detailed narrative of the origin and early stages of the American Revolution. John Murray, 1828. https://archive.org/details/historyofprovinc00hutcuoft/mode/2up.

 

Jimenez, Mary Ann. Changing Faces of Madness: Early American Attitudes and Treatment of the Insane. Brandeis University Press, 1987.

Jimenez, Mary Ann. “Madness in Early American History: Insanity in Massachusetts from 1700 to 1830.” Journal of Social History 20, no. 1 (August 1986): 27. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3788275.pdf?refreqid=fastlydefault%3A9aefbf3225f6f4f1f989ad6aa678a480&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_phrase_search%2Fcontrol&initiator=&acceptTC=1

 

Mass: General Court: House. Journal of the House: May 1782-March 1783, Vol. 3. Massachusetts State Archives. https://archives.lib.state.ma.us/server/api/core/bitstreams/e163ceb1-18d7-4366-8a91-7454691c95a9/content

 

Massachusetts Historical Society. Warren-Adams Letters Being Chiefly a Correspondence Among John Adams, Samuel Adams, and James Warren, vol. 1, 1743-1777. Massachusetts Historical Society, 1917.

 

Massachusetts, Suffolk County, probate & family court records. Probate and Family Court Department FILE PAPERS, Box 077 Cases 14861-15080, 1636-1894. Family Search. Case number 15034. https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3Q9M-CS27-3SQB-9?cat=2822393&i=1532&lang=en
 

Massachusetts, Suffolk County, probate & family court records. Probate and Family Court Department FILE PAPERS, Box 083 Cases 16131-16390, 1636-1894. Family Search. Case number 16253. https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3Q9M-CS2L-RSZP-B?cat=2822393&i=1052&lang=en

 

Massachusetts, Suffolk County, probate & family court records. Probate and Family Court Department FILE PAPERS, Box 090 Cases 17801-18040, 1636-1894. Family Search. Case number 17966. https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3Q9M-CSLF-WSV1-K?cat=2822393&i=1508&lang=en

 

National Constitution Center. “Against Writs of Assistance (1761).” Accessed August 27, 2025. https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/historic-document-library/detail/james-otis-against-writs-of-assistance-february-24-1761.

 

National Park Service. “Samuel Adams: Boston’s Radical Revolutionary.” Accessed August 27, 2025. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/samuel-adams-boston-revolutionary.htm.

 

Otis, James Sr. Letter to James Otis, Jr., August 1, 1772. Gray-Otis Family Papers, ca. 1740-1900. University Archives, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. New York.

 

Otis, James. “Rights of British Colonies Asserted and Proved.” In The Collected Political Writings of James Otis. Edited and with an Introduction by Richard Samuelson. Liberty Fund, 2015.

 

Otis, James. A Vindication of the British Colonies. Boston, 1765. https://archive.org/details/vindicationofbri00otis_1

 

Otis, James. Letter to John Hancock, May 12, 1783. Autograph File, O, 1706-1966. Otis, James, 1725-1783. Houghton Library, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:464943548$1i

 

Otis, Joseph. Letter to James Otis, Sr., January 8, 1749. Otis Family Papers, 1687-1868. University Archives, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. New York.

 

Report of the Record Commissioners of the City of Boston containing the Boston Town Records, 1770 through 1777. Rockwell and Churchill, 1887. https://archive.org/details/recordsrelatingt18bost/page/mode/1up.

 

Rowe, John. John Rowe Diaries Vol. 7. Massachusetts Historical Society. https://www.masshist.org/collection-guides/digitized/fa0535/v07#1.

 

Samuelson, Richard A. “The Constitutional Sanity of James Otis: Resistance Leader and Loyal Subject.” The Review of Politics 61, no. 3 (1999): 493–523. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1408465.

 

Schiff, Stacy. The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams. Little, Brown & Co, 2022.

 

Shipton, Clifford K. Sibley’s Harvard graduates: Volume XI, 1741-1745. Massachusetts Historical Society, 1960. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/pst.000004513766.

 

The Town of Hingham, Massachusetts. History of the Town of Hingham, Massachusetts, Volume I, Part 1. Town of Hingham, Massachusetts, 1893. https://archive.org/details/historyoftownofh01hing.

 

Tudor, William. The life of James Otis, of Massachusetts: containing also, notices of some contemporary characters and events, from the year 1760 to 1775. Wells and Lilly, 1823. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015024854609

 

Warren, Mercy Otis. History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution interspersed with Biographical, Political and Moral Observations, in Two Volumes, Foreword by Lester H. Cohen. Liberty Fund, 1994. https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/cohen-history-of-the-rise-progress-and-termination-of-the-american-revolution-vol-1

 

WikiTree. “James Otis Jr, (1725-1783).” Accessed June 18, 2025. https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Otis-249.

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