A teenager in Lexington, Mass., has for years been teaching people about the battle that started the war 250 years ago this weekend. Her entertaining website has drawn praise and raised eyebrows.
Sabrina Bhattacharjya, 15, at the women’s monument “Something Is Being Done,” in Lexington, Mass., her hometown.Credit...Cassandra Klos for The New York Times
In the Cradle of the American Revolution, Telling History Her Way
A teenager in Lexington, Mass., has for years been teaching people about the battle that started the war 250 years ago this weekend. Her entertaining website has drawn praise and raised eyebrows.
Sabrina Bhattacharjya, 15, at the women’s monument “Something Is Being Done,” in Lexington, Mass., her hometown.Credit...Cassandra Klos for The New York Times
About 242 years after the Battle of Lexington sparked the Revolutionary War, a resident of the Massachusetts town where it took place realized with childlike enthusiasm that the 250th anniversary would be coming in no time. Huzzah!
Obsessed with her hometown’s role in America’s origin story, the resident, Sabrina Bhattacharjya, began planning early for 2025. Very early. Even earlier than the town’s elders, since she had the foresight to lock up the internet domain for Lexington250.com with $53 provided by her financial advisers — her parents.
That’s because Sabrina’s full-time position as a first-grader at Bridge Elementary School did not produce a steady income. She was, after all, only 7 years old.
But a motivated 7, as resolute as the midnight rider Paul Revere himself to alert other kids in town to the history breathing all around them. It galled her that some children thought Revere was a fictional character, a colonial-era Paul Bunyan.
Within five years, Sabrina was using her website to sell T-shirts with historically sassy sayings intended to spark youthful curiosity, but also causing some in town to cough up their mulled cider. Among the phrases was the name of the town — Lexington — followed by a social media abbreviation evoking an emphatic expletive.
Like its creator, the site has matured, becoming an inviting resource for all things Lexington, providing history as well as places to eat, sleep and shop. In preparing for this weekend’s semiquincentennial — which sounds like a medical procedure, but simply means 250th anniversary — Sabrina posted an entry with the headline, “For People Who Think The Battle of Lexington Re-enactment Is Coachella: A Perfect Patriots’ Day Weekend.”
Much of the same information can be found on the town’s official anniversary website, Lex250.org, but without the same exuberance.
The competing — or, perhaps, uneasily coexisting — websites have themselves sparked a bit of local kerfuffle. Suzie Barry, the chairwoman of the town’s Lex250 Commission, which is coordinating the events, recalled that Sabrina’s website had created “confusion in the community,” with some people misinterpreting it as the town’s website.
What’s more, she said, people “were surprised by some of the content.” Asked whether this meant they found Sabrina’s website offensive, Ms. Barry said she could not speak for anyone, other than to say that the website “wasn’t presented like a typical history book.”
“And I get it,” she said. “Appealing to a different audience.”
But Sabrina, who recently turned 15, makes no apologies. “Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve wanted to make history fun and engaging and cool,” she said. “And living in Lexington is like living in your own theme park.”
Lexington, a diverse Boston suburb of about 35,000, has an exceptional school system, high property values — and fierce pride in its revolutionary past. A neighbor wearing a tricorn hat doesn’t warrant a second look; probably one of the Lexington Minute Men. And those teenagers rocking colonial red-white-and-blue while dining at Tatte Bakery? Just members of the William Diamond Junior Fife & Drum Corps.
The town’s sense of self derives from the events of April 19, 1775, which can be recounted with docent-level expertise by Sabrina, granddaughter of immigrants from India.
Revere, dispatched from Boston to alert local militias that British troops were advancing toward Concord to destroy military supplies, rode up on horseback to warn two revolutionary leaders staying at the Hancock-Clarke house, John Hancock and Samuel Adams, that their arrest might also be on the British agenda. Another derring-do rider, William Dawes, arrived soon afterward, but his role is less known, in part because the historically problematic Longfellow poem, “Paul Revere’s Ride,” features only one hero.
Leave it to Sabrina to help clarify the record through T-shirts for sale. One says, “Paul Revere Was Real”; another says, “Don’t Forget William Dawes.”
Then, in early dawn, an overmatched militia of a few dozen men found itself facing a sea of British redcoats across the town common. There came the crack of a gunshot from a source unknown. The British opened fire on the retreating militiamen, killing seven and mortally wounding an eighth, before moving on to Concord, only to retreat when confronted by an unexpected swarm of militiamen.
The world had shifted. Down with tyranny. Down with kings. The war for American independence had begun.
More than two centuries later, a girl named Sabrina was using the historical hip-hop of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Hamilton” as her young life’s background music. She had also found “Liberty’s Kids,” an animated educational series about the revolutionary era. In one episode, two children join Revere’s midnight ride; in another, they witness the Battle of Lexington.
The 7-year-old could hardly believe that Revere had raced down this street, or that the deadly skirmish had unfolded in that field, all right here in Lexington.
“I kind of understood that this was the start of something,” Sabrina said. “I’m the granddaughter of immigrants, and I was connecting it back to what attracts people to America. And it started here. It started with common people.”
The girl kept showing up for a colonial crafts program — making candles! drawing silhouettes! — at the Buckman Tavern museum, the very building where the militia had gathered before its fateful encounter. And when the town held a “Hamilton” singalong, she showed up in a colonial boy’s blue outfit to belt out every song.
“She stuck out because she stuck around,” said Sarah McDonough, the programs manager for the local historical society now, called Lexington History Museums. “She has been so into the history that she participates in every program she can.”