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The Boy Who Lit the Flame
Hardcover of The Boy Who Lit the Flame by Christopher Vandaele — a boy walking a Colonial Boston street at night, carrying a torch.

The Book

The Boy Who Lit the Flame

by Christopher Vandaele

He was only eleven years old. But his death would help ignite a revolution.

Set in the turbulent streets of Colonial Boston, The Boy Who Lit the Flame brings young readers into the events leading to the American Revolution through the lives of the children who witnessed them.

At the center is Christopher Seider, an eleven-year-old boy whose death became a rallying cry in Boston's growing struggle for liberty.

A story of courage, consequence, and the young lives too often left out of history.

Author
Christopher Vandaele
Publisher
Hundred Media Press
Status
Publication details forthcoming
ISBN
ISBN forthcoming
Publication date
To be announced
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The history

The history behind the story

On 22 February 1770, eleven-year-old Christopher Seider was shot in Boston. He died that night. His funeral drew thousands. Eleven days later came the Boston Massacre.

Seider is often remembered as the first casualty of the American Revolutionary cause, and then forgotten, as children's lives so often are in the telling of nations.

John Adams rode back into Boston on February 26 just as the funeral procession was forming, and what he saw stopped him enough to write it down that night. He recorded that a vast number of boys walked before the coffin, and a vast number of men and women after it, with a line of carriages behind them. He wrote that his eyes had never beheld such a painful funeral. He read the size of the crowd as a warning: the people's anger, he wrote, would not be quelled by the death of one child. Eleven days later, it wasn't.

The Boy Who Lit the Flame returns to the children who were there.

Christopher Seider was an eleven-year-old boy in Colonial Boston whose death, on 22 February 1770, became a rallying cry in Boston's growing struggle for liberty.

Read Chapter One free