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Robert Pushkar

Robert Pushkar

Robert Pushkar is a Boston-based writer, photographer, playwright and independent scholar in Hemingway Studies. His news articles, features and photographs appear in national and regional magazines and newspapers and online publications. His play, Martinis and Madness, premiered at the Boston Playwrights’ Theater Marathon 25.

“Here … we claim the first blow was struck in the war of independence,” wrote Salem historian Charles Moses Endicott in his account of Leslie's Retreat.

Was This Little-Known Standoff Between British Soldiers and Colonists the Real Start of the American Revolution?

On February 26, 1775, residents of Salem, Massachusetts, banded together to force the British to withdraw from their town during an oft-overlooked encounter known as Leslie’s Retreat

“Had it not been for the testament given [to] him by Mr. Foster, which received a second bullet, I doubt if you would have ever seen him again,” wrote journalist Benjamin Perley Poore in a letter to Merrill's father.

The Bible That Stopped a Bullet

In 1863, a New Testament tucked in the pocket of Union soldier Charles W. Merrill prevented a musket ball from mortally wounding him