Expo 76: Future Vision or Fever Dream? (episode 219)
Mar 28, 2021
Expo 76
Early sketch showing the Expo extending to the outer harbor
Early sketch of Thompson Island
First published plan
Boston Globe, 15 Jan 1967
Space-inspired 1969 plan
Space!
Thompson Island dome
Model showing StarrCar guideways
Modular model
Boston Globe, 15 Jan 1969
Boston Globe, 15 Jan 1969
Modular sketch
Alden StarrCars
Season one of the podcast A Peoples History uses the story of Boston’s Columbia Point housing project as a lens through which to examine the Black liberation struggles of the 60s and 70s, as well as Boston’s housing crisis today. Told from the viewpoint of Marxist history, this show offers a different viewpoint on a story rarely told.
Upcoming Event
Lantern2021, a virtual family-friendly event, will celebrate the heroic actions of April 18, 1775, and Old North’s legacy of active citizenship. Join us for an uplifting evening featuring original music by Ryan Ahlwardt (formerly of Straight No Chaser), a spirited performance of the poem “Paul Revere’s Ride” by Rick Taylor (as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow), and the inspiring words of honoree Dave McGillivray, long-time Race Director for the Boston Marathon. Proceeds from Lantern2021 will support the Old North Foundation’s virtual and on-site programs, which aim to inspire children and adults alike to consider the ways they can build a more just and equitable world.
Disaster at Bussey Bridge (episode 218)
Mar 14, 2021
March 14 is the anniversary of one of the worst railroad accidents that ever happened in Massachusetts. On March 14, 1887, a train filled with suburban commuters was on its way from Dedham to Park Square station in Boston, stopping in West Roxbury and Roslindale along the way. Moments before it would have passed through Forest Hills, disaster struck. By the time the engineer turned around, he saw a cloud of dust and a pile of twisted rubble where nine passenger cars should have been. In a split second, a normal morning commute was transformed into a nightmare of death and dismemberment for hundreds of passengers.
This week’s podcast is sponsored by Liberty & Co, who sell unique products inspired by the American Revolution. See below for details on their March 2021 pre-order sale.
The original Bussey Bridge
Map and elevation profile of the tracks near South Street
The derailed cars that remained on the embankment
Smashed cars in the street below
Diagram showing where each car came to rest
The faulty hangers
Rescue in progress
Largrer version
An illustration of the rescue in progress
Sponsored by Liberty & Co.
This week’s podcast is sponsored by Liberty & Co, who sell unique products inspired by the American Revolution. For the next two weeks, they’re holding their biggest pre-order sale ever, with eight brand new t-shirt designs dropping on April 1st.
Boston history fans might be interested in the “Rebellious Stripes” shirt bearing the banner of the Loyal Nine that can be seen at the Old State House museum. Or you might prefer the “John Hancock Shipping Company” design featuring the most famous signature in American history superimposed over the image of a merchant ship like the ones that built the Hancock fortune. I think my favorite is “An appeal to heaven,” with those words emblazoned over a green pine tree on a white background, adopting the flag of the Massachusetts navy, from back when we had our own navy.
Remember, the more you bundle by March 31, the more you save, so check out all eight designs. This time, there’s no promo code necessary (though you can save 20% on any other purchase with code HUBHISTORY), just make sure to get your pre-order in before the end of March.
Richard T Greener and the White Problem (episode 217)
Feb 28, 2021
Professor Richard T Greener grew up in Boston in the shadow of the abolition movement, graduated from Harvard, and became one of the foremost Black intellectuals of his era. However, soon after publishing his most influential work, when it seemed like he would take up the mantle of Frederick Douglass, he instead sank into obscurity. He was nearly forgotten for over a century, until his legacy was rediscovered in 2009 in a discarded steamer trunk in a dusty attic on the South Side of Chicago.
Gardiner, Charles A., John T. Morgan, Frederick Douglass, Z. B. Vance, Joel Chandler Harris, Richard T. Greener, Oliver Johnson, S. C. Armstrong, J. H. Walworth, and J. A. Emerson. “The Future of the Negro.” The North American Review 139, no. 332 (1884)
His black friends and colleagues often looked askance at the light-skinned Greener’s ease among whites and sometimes wrongfully accused him of trying to “pass.” While he was overseas on a diplomatic mission, Greener’s wife and five children stayed in New York City, changed their names, and vanished into white society. Greener never saw them again. At a time when Americans viewed themselves simply as either white or not, Greener lost not only his family but also his sense of clarity about race.
Richard Greener’s story demonstrates the human realities of racial politics throughout the fight for abolition, the struggle for equal rights, and the backslide into legal segregation. Katherine Reynolds Chaddock has written a long overdue narrative biography about a man, fascinating in his own right, who also exemplified America’s discomfiting perspectives on race and skin color. Uncompromising Activist is a lively tale that will interest anyone curious about the human elements of the equal rights struggle.
Upcoming Event
Everyone knows Paul Revere’s famous engraving of the bloody massacre on King Street that helped cement the Boston Massacre in American memory. It’s easy to find copies of the engraving, and you can even see the original copper plate Revere etched to create the engraving from at the Commonwealth Museum in Dorchester. But did you know that Paul Revere staged an elaborate visual spectacle to commemorate the first anniversary of the tragedy? I’ve always imagined that in the days before television and movies, his Massacre illumination would have been transfixing. Our friends at the Paul Revere House write,
The Paul Revere House is excited to present a commemorative reimagining marking the 250th anniversary of Paul Revere’s Boston Massacre illuminations.
On March 5, 1771, Paul Revere used his recently purchased home to keep the memory of the Boston Massacre and opposition to the British occupation in Boston fresh with a series of three illuminations displayed in the windows facing North Square. According to contemporary reports, thousands streamed by his house in silence to witness the spectacle which was a key link in the Revolutionary chain between the Boston Massacre and the Boston Tea Party.
Our virtual program offers footage of a local artist’s reimagining of the illuminations, descriptions from period newspaper accounts, and an in-depth panel discussion with Revere engraving expert, Prof. Nancy Siegel, and Boston Massacre scholar Prof. Serena Zabin to add context and color to this incredibly significant event.
There’s a $10 suggested donation with your registration, and the video will debut at 6:30pm on March 5, the 250th anniversary of the illumination and 251st anniversary of the Massacre.
BONUS: David Walker's Radical Appeal
Feb 26, 2021
For Black History Month, we're dropping some of our favorite past episodes back into the podcast feed every few days this month. Enjoy!
David Walker was one of America’s first radical abolitionists, a free African American man who moved to Boston in 1824 to escape the danger and humiliations of life in the slave states. He became a prominent member of Black society in Boston before writing and distributing An Appeal to the Colored People of the World. This radical work called for the immediate abolition of slavery, and even advocated violence against whites to bring about emancipation. At the time, few white leaders were talking openly about ending slavery, and those who were favored gradual emancipation. Frederick Douglass would later say that the book “startled the land like a trump of coming judgement,” and it shook the slaveowning society of the white South to the core.
Show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/117
BONUS: Tent City
Feb 24, 2021
For Black History Month, we're dropping some of our favorite past episodes back into the podcast feed every few days this month. Enjoy!
50 years ago this week, residents of one Boston neighborhood carried out an act of civil disobedience, bringing attention to the city’s need for affordable housing. A group of mostly African American residents occupied an empty lot where rowhouses once stood. It was Boston’s 1968 Tent City protest, and it helped change how the city approaches development and urban planning.
Show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/077
BONUS: Fifteen Blocks of Rage
Feb 22, 2021
For Black History Month, we're dropping some of our favorite past episodes back into the podcast feed every few days this month. Enjoy!
For decades, a 1967 riot that rocked Roxbury’s Grove Hall neighborhood was generally referred to in the mainstream media as a "race riot" or as "the welfare riot," while a handful of articles and books by Black authors called it "the police riot." A group of mostly African American women who led a group called Mothers for Adequate Welfare were staging a sit-in protest at a welfare office on Blue Hill Avenue. When tensions escalated, the police stormed in and used force to remove the group. Onlookers were outraged by the violence and attempted to stop the police. The resulting riot spanned three nights in Roxbury, with arson, looting, and shots fired both by and at the police, and the scars it left behind took decades to heal.
Show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/140
BONUS: Black Radical
Feb 21, 2021
From his Harvard graduation in 1895 to his death in 1934, William Monroe Trotter was one of the most influential and uncompromising advocates for the rights of Black Americans. He was a leader who had the vision to co-found groups like the Niagara Movement and the NAACP, but he also had an ego that prevented him from working effectively within the movements he started. He was a critic of Booker T Washington, and an early ally of Marcus Garvey. Monroe Trotter was the publisher of the influential Black newspaper the Boston Guardian, and he is the subject of a new biography by Tufts Professor Kerri Greenidge called Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter.
For show notes, check out http://HUBhistory.com/183
BONUS: Birth of a Nation
Feb 19, 2021
For Black History Month, we're dropping some of our favorite past episodes back into the podcast feed every few days this month. Enjoy!
“The Birth of a Nation” was one of the most controversial movies ever made, and when it premiered on February 8, 1915 it almost instantly became the greatest blockbuster of the silent movie era. It featured innovative new filmmaking techniques, a revolutionary score, and it was anchored by thrilling action scenes shot on a never-before-seen scale, with thousands of actors and extras, hundreds of horses, and battlefield effects like real cannons.
“Birth of a Nation” was apologetically racist, promoting white supremacy and glorifying the Ku Klux Klan as the noble, heroic saviors of white America from the villainous clutches of evil black men bent on rape and destruction. Upon the film’s 50th anniversary in 1965, NAACP president Roy Wilkins proclaimed that all the progress that African Americans had made over the past half century couldn’t outweigh the damage done by “Birth of a Nation.”
When the film debuted in Boston in April of 1915, audience reaction was split along racial lines, with white Bostonians flocking to see the movie in record numbers, while black Bostonians organized protests and boycotts, with leaders like William Monroe Trotter attempting to have it banned in Boston.
Show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/121
BONUS: Politics and Partisanship
Feb 17, 2021
For Black History Month, we're dropping some of our favorite past episodes back into the podcast feed every few days this month. Enjoy!
Historian Millington Bergeson-Lockwood, author of Race Over Party: Black Politics and Partisanship in Late Nineteenth-Century Boston, joins us this week to talk about the evolution of partisanship and political loyalty among Boston’s African American community, from just after the Civil War until the turn of the 20th century. It was a period that at first promised political and economic advancement for African Americans, but ended with the rise of lynching and codified Jim Crow laws. It was also a period that began with near universal support for Lincoln’s Republican party among African Americans, with Frederick Douglass commenting “the Republican party is the ship and all else is the sea.” However, after decades of setbacks and roadblocks on the path of progress, many began to question their support of the GOP, and some tried to forge a new, non-partisan path to Black advancement. Dr. Bergeson-Lockwood will tell us how the movement developed and whether it ultimately achieved its goals.
Show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/154
BONUS: Mary Mildred Williams
Feb 15, 2021
For Black History Month, we're dropping some of our favorite past episodes back into the podcast feed every few days this month. Enjoy!
We’re joined this week by Dr. Jessie Morgan-Owens, who called from New Orleans to discuss her book Girl in Black and White: The Story of Mary Mildred Williams and the Abolition Movement. Mary was born into slavery in Virginia, the child of an enslaved mother and father. Through the remarkable efforts of her father, the entire family was emancipated when Mary was 7 years old. Shortly thereafter, Mary caught the eye of Senator Charles Sumner. Her complexion was light enough for her to pass as white, making her a powerful political symbol for the abolitionist cause. The books details her life and deep ties to the Boston area.
Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/157
Demanding Satisfaction: Dueling in Boston (episode 216)
Feb 14, 2021
A little more than three years ago, cohost emerita Nikki and I were on our way to see the Hamilton musical for the first time. In our excitement, we decided to record an episode about an 1806 political duel in Boston that had a lot of parallels with the Hamilton-Burr duel. We dug into the history of dueling in Boston, how dueling laws evolved in response to the duels that were fought here, and why a young Boston Democratic-Republican and a young Boston Federalist decided they had to fight each other to the death in Rhode Island. Unfortunately, we also peppered samples from the Hamilton soundtrack throughout the episode in our excitement, stomping all over Lin Manuel’s intellectual property. The unlicensed music even got the episode pulled from at least one podcast app. This week, I went back to our original recording and re-edited it to clean it up and remove all the Hamiltunes. So get ready to meet Charles Sumner’s dad and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s dad, sail on the USS Constitution, and Alexander Hamilton himself will even put in a brief appearance. Plus, we’ll learn why fighting a duel in Massachusetts could get you buried at a crossroads with a stake driven through your heart.
Democratic-Republican Captain Joseph Loring’s response to perceived affronts by Federalist Major General Simon Elliot, former commander of the Corps of Cadets.
1719: enacts a 100 pound fine, 6 months in prison, and corporal punishment for issuing or accepting a challenge.
1730: A challenge or non-fatal duel is punishable by an hour on the gallows and a year in prison. Anyone who is killed in a duel or executed in a duel will be given an unchristian burial at a gallows or crossroads, with a stake driven through their body. (An interesting article about the history of staked burial)
1784: Adds 39 lashes for a non-fatal duel, bans anyone who issues a challenge from holding public office, and increases the fine for a challenge to 300 pounds. Adds dissection for those killed in a duel or executed for dueling.
1805: Non-fatal duels will be prosecuted as felonious assault and the offender will be barred from holding public office. Staked burial is no longer a punishment for fatal duels, but dissection still is. Any challenge issued or accepeted, even if no duel is fought, is punishable by a year in prison.
Current Massachusetts law allows anyone who fights a duel in another state to be prosecuted for murder in Massachusetts. Anyone who is a second in a fatal duel is an accessory before the fact. Most of the rest of our dueling laws were repealed in 1962.
BONUS: Fugitive Slave Act
Feb 12, 2021
For Black History Month, we're dropping some of our favorite past episodes back into the podcast feed every few days this month. Enjoy!
Here are three classic episodes honoring black and white abolitionists in 19th Century Boston. Recorded in February 2017, in the wake of President Trump’s attempt to implement a “Muslim Ban,” these episodes focus on Boston’s resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act, which was seen as an unjust law. They're from very early in our podcasting career, so please forgive how rough they are around the edges.
Show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/067
BONUS: Separate but Equal
Feb 10, 2021
For Black History Month, we're dropping some of our favorite past episodes back into the podcast feed every few days this month. Enjoy!
The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ruled on Roberts v Boston 170 years ago this month. When five year old Sarah Roberts was turned away from the schoolhouse door in Boston simply because of the color of her skin, her father sued the city in an attempt to force the public schools to desegregate, in compliance with a state law that had been intended to do just that years before. Unfortunately, the suit was unsuccessful. Not only did the Boston schools remain segregated, but the court’s decision provided the legal framework of “separate but equal,” which would be used to justify segregated schools across the country for a century to come.
Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/162
BONUS: Dr. Rebecca Crumpler's 190th Birthday
Feb 08, 2021
For Black History Month, we're dropping some of our favorite past episodes back into the podcast feed every few days this month. Enjoy!
Dr. Rebecca Davis Lee Crumpler was the first Black woman to earn a medical degree in the US in 1864, and she spent most of her adult life in Charlestown, Beacon Hill, and the Readville section of Hyde Park. She devoted her career to pediatrics and obstetrics, published the first medical text by an African American author, and made a point of caring for the marginalized, even moving to Virginia to tend to formerly enslaved people at the end of the Civil War. The nation’s first Black female physician lay in an unmarked grave for 125 years, but there have been important developments in the story of Dr. Crumpler while we’ve been in quarantine this year.
Double Bonus: February 8, 2021 is Dr. Crumpler's 190th birthday, and the mayor has proclaimed it to be Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler Day in the City of Boston. Huzzah!
Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/200
BONUS: Unequal Justice in Boston
Feb 07, 2021
For Black History Month, we're dropping some of our favorite past episodes back into the podcast feed every few days this month. Enjoy!
This week we’re revisiting two classic episodes to highlight injustice in how the death penalty has been applied in our city’s history. First, we’re going to visit early Boston, in a time when execution by hanging was a shockingly common sentence for everything from murder and piracy to witchcraft and Quakerdom. During this period, hanging was the usual, and execution by fire was decidedly unusual. This punishment was reserved only for members of one race and one sex, and in Boston’s history, only two enslaved African American women were burned at the stake. After that, we’ll fast forward to the mid-19th century, when it seemed like the death penalty would soon be abolished. After 13 years without an execution in Boston, a black sailor was convicted of first degree murder. Despite the fact that white men convicted in similar circumstances were sentenced to life in prison, he was condemned to death. And despite tens of thousands of signatures on petitions for clemency, he was hanged at Leverett Street Jail in May of 1849.
Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/182
BONUS: The Roots of Slavery in Boston
Feb 05, 2021
For Black History Month, we're dropping some of our favorite past episodes back into the podcast feed every few days this month. Enjoy!
The Boston slave trade began when a ship arrived in the harbor in the summer of 1638 carrying a cargo of enslaved Africans, but there was already a history of slave ownership in the new colony. After this early experience, Massachusetts would continue to be a slave owning colony for almost 150 years. In this week’s episode, we discuss the origins of African slavery in Massachusetts and compare the experience of enslaved Africans to other forms of unfree labor in Boston, such as enslaved Native Americans, Scottish prisoners of war, and indentured servants.
Warning: This week’s episode uses some of the racialized language of our 17th and 18th century sources, and it describes an act of sexual violence.
Show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/074
Literal Nazis (episode 215)
Jan 31, 2021
They stockpiled guns and ammunition. They built homemade bombs. They had a hit list of a dozen members of Congress who were targeted for assassination. They believed themselves to be patriots, with soldiers and police officers among their ranks. They rallied under the motto of America First, but they planned to overthrow our Constitutional government and install a fascist dictatorship. Believe it or not, I’m not talking about the insurrection on January 6, 2021, but instead a plot that the FBI uncovered in January 1940. The subsequent investigation threw a spotlight on a group called the Christian Front that made its headquarters at Boston’s Copley Plaza hotel, promoting violent attacks on Jewish Bostonians while accepting covert funding and support from a Nazi spymaster who flew the swastika proudly from his home on Beacon Hill.
All the Bells and Whistles (episode 214)
Jan 17, 2021
The first commercially viable telephone network was created by a Boston inventor and entrepreneur. Not Alexander Graham Bell, who is credited with inventing the telephone, but Edwin Thomas Holmes. Starting in the 1850s, his father Edwin Holmes created the first burglar alarm company here in Boston, then Edwin Thomas Holmes adapted the alarm company’s network of telegraph wires in the 1870s to work with the telephone switchboard he invented. Working with Alexander Graham Bell, the Holmes company turned his invention into a business and helped him build the Bell Telephone Company.
Edwin Thomas Holmes insulates wire with paint in his father’s backyard
Pope’s alarm bell
The Holmes shop on Tremont Row
Edwin Holmes’ demonstration alarm
Charles Williams’ shop on Court Street
The Holmes building on Washington Street with a forest of wires on the roof
The first telephone switchboard, created by Edwin Thomas Holmes
The Lighthouse Tragedy (episode 213)
Jan 03, 2021
In November 1718, a tragedy on Boston Harbor cut short the lives of six people, including the first keeper of Boston Light and four members of his household. To find out what happened that morning, we’re going to look at what Boston Harbor was like before the construction of Boston Light, why Boston Harbor needed a lighthouse, how it got built, and who was chosen as the first keeper. We’ll also look at the founding father who was moved to poetry by the tragedy, as well as the centuries long search for Ben Franklin’s lost verses and a 20th century hoax that got repeated as truth. Then we’ll close out the show with a quick look at the present and future of Boston Light on Little Brewster Island.
Our header image is taken from this pre-Revolution Boston Harbor chart, showing Boston Light before it was burned by the Patriots, blown up by the British, and rebuilt after the war was over. This is closer to the appearance of the original Boston Light than the below, which I took from the Provincetown Fast Ferry on a very bad morning.
Sponsored by Liberty & Co.
This week’s podcast is sponsored by Liberty & Co, who sell unique products inspired by the American Revolution. One of their latest offerings is a line of historically accurate coffee and tea by Oliver Pluff.
The Boston Tea Party was one of the first revolutionary acts, with disguised Bostonians dumping 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor on December 16, 1773. Join the party with Liberty & Co’s Teas of the Boston Tea Party, a selection of four period-appropriate loose leaf teas presented in corked glass vials in a wooden display case. Or choose the East India Company bundle, with a beautiful stoneware mug decorated with the same company trademark that adorned the chests that Bostonians chopped open, alongside a canister of Oolong tea with a matching East India Company trademark.
If you prefer coffee, try the Green Dragon bundle. The Green Dragon Tavern was home to the St Andrews Freemason lodge, the Loyal Nine, the Sons of Liberty, and the Boston Committee of Correspondence. It was where the Tea Party was planned and where Paul Revere got his instructions to ride to Lexington and Concord. This bundle pairs a special Green Dragon Blend ground coffee in a beautiful canister with a stoneware mug decorated with the Green Dragon logo and a matching sticker.
Save 20% on any purchase with the discount code HUBHISTORY.
The Original War on Christmas (episode 212)
Dec 20, 2020
The Puritan dissenters who founded the town of Boston are remembered as a deeply religious society, so you might think that Christmas in Puritan Boston would be a big deal. You’d be wrong though. Celebrating Christmas was against the law for decades, and it was against cultural norms for a century or more. What were the Puritans’ theological misgivings about Christmas? What were the practices of misrule, mummery, and wassailing with which Christmas was celebrated in the 17th century? And why did the Puritans literally erase Christmas from their calendars?
Ice seems like such a simple thing today, when I can just go to my freezer and grab a few cubes to cool down my drink. But before artificial refrigeration, New Englanders would cut and store ice during the long winter to keep their food fresh and their drinks cold during the summer. That was all well and good for people who lived near an ice pond anyway, but what about people in the faraway tropics who might want to get their hands on some ice? Until the early 1800s, the idea of shipping ice to the tropics was seen as a crazy pipe dream, but then along came Frederic Tudor, the Boston entrepreneur who built a fortune and a global reputation as the Ice King!
Frederic Tudor
Scoring ice to cut
Wyeth’s Ice Plow (public domain via Woods Hole Museum)
Wyeth’s Ice Plow (public domain via Woods Hole Museum)
Gangway to carry ice from train to ship
Tudor’s Fresh Pond operation, with the Charlestown Branch Railroad in the background
Manufacturing “Hooghly Ice” in India
Tudor’s Bombay ice house (second building, with domed white roof)
Details of handwork in ice harvesting provided by the Jamaica Plain Historical Society
Lost Wonderland, with Stephen Wilk (episode 210)
Nov 22, 2020
The show this week is all about Wonderland, the early 20th century amusement park at Revere Beach. Dr. Stephen Wilk has deeply researched the investors and entrepreneurs who bought 27 acres of land along Revere Beach Boulevard and opened the park; the inventors behind rides like Shoot the Chutes, Hell’s Gate, and Love’s Journey; and the people who ran attractions like a firefighting demonstration, a wild west show, and a model Japanese village. His new book Lost Wonderland: The brief and brilliant life of Boston’s million dollar amusement park reveals all of that, as well as changes in the broader economy that doomed Wonderland nearly from the beginning. After opening in 1906, the park went through periods of success and bankruptcy in a meteoric run that lasted just four short years, while leaving a major cultural impression on the Boston area, and Revere in particular.
Dr. Stephen Wilk is an MIT-trained optical engineer and the author of How the Ray Gun Got its Zap, Medusa: Solving the Mystery of the Gorgon, and a young adult novel called The Traveler. He’s also the author of an upcoming book on optics from Oxford University Press tentatively titled Sandbows and Blacklights, which will attempt to untangle the layers of mystery and misinformation about the true inventor of the modern black light. His latest book about Revere’s Wonderland amusement park is called Lost Wonderland: The brief and brilliant life of Boston’s million dollar amusement park.
A Shooting at the State House (episode 209)
Nov 08, 2020
From our viewpoint in modern Massachusetts, with stringent gun licensing and background check laws, it’s hard to imagine how a young man with an extensive criminal record who had been involuntarily committed to multiple mental health institutions could walk into a store and walk back out with a shiny new handgun. And from a post-9/11 point of view, with security at the forefront of every public space, it’s hard to imagine how an uninvited visitor could walk right into the governor’s State House office and open fire. But on December 5, 1907, that's exactly what happened, when a disturbed man with a gun and a grudge decided to pay a visit to our seat of government.
Edward Cohen
Dennis Driscoll
Arthur Huddell
James/John Steele
James/John Steele
Ghost Stories (episode 208)
Oct 25, 2020
In honor of Halloween, I’m going to be sharing eight of my favorite Boston ghost stories this week. From haunted houses and inexplicable premonitions recorded by Cotton and Increase Mather in the years leading up to the Salem Witch hysteria, to Nathaniel Hawthorne encountering his friend in the reading room at the Athenaeum for weeks after the friend’s death, to the apparition that only seems to appear in Boston’s most venerable gay bar when only one person is there to see it, we’ll cover nearly four hundred years of paranormal claims. And if you’re wondering why parts of the recording aren’t up to our usual standards, it’s because I was recording this after midnight, and I fell asleep in the middle of recording multiple times.
Wondering about the upcoming changes to the show? Check out this week’s bonus episode.
Boston Book Club
The Greater Boston Challenge is a fun little book full of challenges to test your knowledge about Boston. There are fun quizzes about local history, sports, crimes, neighborhoods, businesses, and other topics, with each topical chapter containing a 75 question quiz and a bonus crossword puzzle. You can test yourself against the book, or even better, challenge your friends to go head to head.
It was written by Gordon and Ann Mathieson, who also created a board game about Cape Cod. A Quincy native, Gordon has also written 11 volumes of mostly young adult fiction, most of which are set in the Boston area.
For the final Boston Book Club, we are also highlighting some other Boston history (and history-adjacent) podcasts.
This week’s event is a partnership between the History Project and Historic New England. On November 12, they’re teaming up to present a program called “Looking for the first gay American novel: A forgotten book by Sarah Orne Jewett.” You may recall hearing Sarah Orne Jewett’s name from our episode about so-called Boston marriages, where 19th century women engaged in long-term, deeply committed, monogamous relationships that may or may not have been sexual. Jewett and Annie Adams Fields lived together on Charles Street at the foot of Beacon Hill and hosted the most amazing, star spangled salon nights you can imagine.
The History Project is the premier New England organization cataloging and recording the LGBTQ History of Boston and beyond. Working with Historic New England, they’re turning to Sarah Orne Jewett in their search for the first “gay American novel.” Here’s the description from the Historic New England website:
The popularity of James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956), Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City (1978-2014), and Hanya Yanagihara’s recent hit A Little Life (2015) indicates the profound connection people feel with LGBTQ+ fiction. But who authored the first gay American novel? Scholars have proposed origins for the tradition in Margaret Sweat’s Ethel’s Love-Life (1859) and Bayard Taylor’s Joseph and His Friend: A Tale of Pennsylvania (1870).
However, Professor Don James McLaughlin of the University of Tulsa makes the case in this virtual talk that A Marsh Island (1885), a little-known novel serialized in The Atlantic by Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909), is significant for being the first novel to explore major, now-familiar facets of a burgeoning modern gay American consciousness.
The talk will begin at 5pm on Thursday, November 12. Tickets will be priced on a sliding scale, starting at $25 and going down from there according to need.
Fourth Anniversary Bonus Episode
Oct 25, 2020
This week marks the fourth anniversary of HUB History. Listen to this brief bonus track to learn how the show has changed in the past four years, what our most popular episodes have been, and where the show is going in the future. Be sure to listen to the end for an important announcement about some changes to the show's format and schedule.
Launching the USS Constitution (episode 207)
Oct 18, 2020
The USS Constitution is the most famous ship in Boston history, and perhaps in the history of the US Navy. When the Navy was reborn in 1794, the Constitution was among the first fleet of frigates that made up its backbone. A decade later, the USS Constitution would earn a brilliant, nearly flawless record of naval combat against the British in the war of 1812, and today it stands as the oldest commissioned warship afloat in the world and the last American ship to sink an enemy in a ship-to-ship duel. However, the Constitution’s origins were far from flawless. It was part of a procurement program that was nearly cancelled, and the famous frigate was almost scrapped before it was even completed. After it was rescued and completed, the USS Constitution took not one, not two, but three attempts to successfully launch.
via USS Constitution Museum
via USS Constitution Museum
Boston Book Club
We recently added a copy of the Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys by Doris Kearns Goodwin to our HUB History library, after it was recently recommended to co-host emerita Nikki for its descriptions of life in the North End and the role that St. Stephen’s and other churches played as a quiet in the storm of tenement life. Since much of the drama in our main story takes place in Edmund Hartt’s North End shipyard, it only made sense to feature a book that would also highlight North End stories. In a narrow street off of North Square, a small plaque on an unassuming doorway announces the birthplace of Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy. Here’s how the publisher describes the book:
In its drama and scope, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys is one of the richest works of biography in the last decade (that decade being the 80s as the book was published in 1991). From the wintry day in 1863 when John Francis Fitzgerald was baptized, through the memorable moment ninety-eight years later when his grandson and namesake John Fitzgerald Kennedy was inaugurated as President of the United States, the author brings us every colorful inch of this unique American tapestry. Each character emerges unmistakenly, with the clarity and complexity of personal recollection: “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, the mayor of Boston and founder of his dynasty; his independent and shrewdly political daughter, Rose, and her husband, the cunning, manipulative Joseph P. Kennedy; finally, the “Golden trio” of Kennedy children–Joe Jr., Kathleen, and Jack–whose promise was eclipsed by the greater power of fate. With unprecedented access to the Kennedy family and to decades of private papers, Doris Kearns Goodwin has crafted a singular work of American history: It is at once the story of an era, of the immigrant experience, and–most of all–of two families, whose ambitions propelled them to unrivaled power and whose passions nearly destroyed them.
Upcoming Events
If you miss traveling as much as I do, you might enjoy an upcoming event from the Boston Athenaeum. Eye of the Expert: Views of Boston invites us to see our own city through the eyes of an outsider. Here’s how they describe it:
Miss traveling? Join “tour guides” Assistant Curator Christina Michelon, Rare Materials Catalog Librarian Graham Skinner, and Director of Education Hannah Weisman for an evening of armchair travel through our own extraordinary city, focused on the work of three twentieth-century artists.
Michelon will explore how historic architecture was perceived in the 1930s as well as today by examining Berenice Abbott’s sharply-focused and high-contrast views of Boston’s built environment. Shifting from a documentarian to tourist perspective, Skinner will take us to some of Boston’s iconic destinations depicted in poet, travel writer, and artist Chiang Yee’s original illustrations for his 1959 book, The Silent Traveller in Boston. And Weisman will lead us into the South End to experience the neighborhood as painter and illustrator Allan Rohan Crite knew it in 1977 when he created An Artist’s Sketchbook of the South End during his residency at the Museum of African American History.
The virtual tour is free to the public with registration required. It will be held on Wednesday, October 21st from 6-7pm. Real-time captions for the event can be requested.
If you miss that talk, we have a bonus event on October 27, with Marta Crilly of the Boston City Archives. She’ll be giving a talk for the Boston Public Library about using the Archives to research local and family history in Boston. Here’s how the library describes the event:
Are you a local historian? Neighborhood history enthusiast? Genealogist? Boston City Archives holds millions of public records, spanning over 300 years of city government, and documenting Boston’s residents, schools, parks, buildings, and governance. Archivist Marta Crilly will give an overview of the records available to researchers and offer tips on how to navigate the Archives’ vast collections.
Marta has been a great help to me personally in researching local history, tracking down city documents that were pivotal in writing our episodes about perambulating Boston’s bounds and resisting the KKK in Boston, so I can vouch that she knows what she’s talking about.
Joseph Chapman, from Boston to L.A. (episode 206)
Oct 11, 2020
Your humble host really misses travel, so this week’s episode is inspired by travel, both historic travel and my own. In the early 19th century, a Boston shipwright’s apprentice went to sea with a whaling voyage, and ended up being recruited into a crew that was assembled in the Hawaiian Islands, then captured by Spanish authorities on the California coast and accused of piracy. Escaping the gallows through hard work and Yankee ingenuity, Joseph Chapman would build a New England style mill for the San Gabriel mission, the first of its kind in Alta California. He would live through tumultuous times, witnessing the independence of Mexico, the downfall of the mission system he had become part of, and eventually the American annexation of California.
The campanario, or wall of bells, at San Gabriel
Chapman’s millrace
The historic plaque that caught my attention
Enormous grape vine
Tiny grapes
Diagram of Chapman’s Mill
Millrace as excavated in 2009
A monument to the thousands of Tongvans buried at San Gabriel
Boston Book Club
Sidney Perley was an attorney, who graduated from BU School of Law in 1886, and a self taught historian. He published a half dozen legal textbooks and another nine volumes of New England history, most of which focus on Cape Ann and the witch hysteria. However, whenever I need to research a weather anomaly that occurred in Boston between English colonization and 1891, Perley’s Historic Storms of New England is my first stop.
From the great hurricane of 1635, the English colonists’ first experiences with earthquakes, comets, eclipses, and dark days, to historic blizzards, gales, tornados, and droughts, Perley explains each one in detail. He uses period sources to show what the people who lived through these extreme events thought they were experiencing, and he uses the latest scientific knowledge to bring a late 19th century “modern” perspective to them. It’s a great resource for researching any extreme or unusual weather, atmospheric, or cosmic event.
Upcoming Event(s)
Wednesday, October 21 at 4pm: Revolutionary Spaces is hosting the next edition of Reflecting Attucks, their year long series of events commemorating the 250th anniversary of the Boston Massacre and its most famous victim, Crispus Attucks. Titled “Demanding Freedom: Attucks and the Abolition Movement,” this talk will examine how 19th century abolitionists revived the memory of Attucks, after he had been nearly forgotten as a man of African and Native descent in a country that was building historical myths of its white founders. The panelists will be Christopher Bonner, of the University of Maryland, author of Remaking the Republic: Black Politics and the Creation of American Citizenship; Kellie Carter Jackson of Wellesley College, author of Force & Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence; and Stephen Kantrowitz of the University of Wisconsin, author of More than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829-1889. Here’s how Revolutionary Spaces describes the talk:
“Demanding Freedom: Attucks and the Abolition Movement” reflects on how 19th century abolitionists revived Crispus Attucks’s memory in their fight to end slavery. Abolitionists of the era presented Attucks as the first martyr of the Revolution who died fighting for liberty, an image that resonated powerfully in a nation that placed millions of African Americans in bondage despite its stated ideal of freedom. In the conversation, we will place the work of abolitionists into a contemporary setting by reflecting on the obstacles that persist to today when Americans are asked to live up to the founding promises of freedom and liberty for all.
Wednesday, October 21 at 6pm: The Boston Public Library will be hosting a talk at 6pm with author Bill McEvoy about his book Rainsford Island: A Boston Harbor Case Study in Public Neglect and Private Activism. Self-published in January, his book delves deep into the decades when a small Island in Boston Harbor was transformed from a quarantine hospital into the site of public city institutions that weren’t wanted in other neighborhoods, including hospitals, asylums, and reformatories. Here’s what the BPL website says about the talk:
Author Bill McEvoy explores the history of Rainsford Island in Boston Harbor. Beginning with private ownership from 1636 to 1736, then the Province of the Massachusetts Bay, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and finally the City of Boston. The island’s complex history is best told by segmenting its various periods. Until 1854, it was occasionally a place of quarantine, as well as a summer resort for the wealthy. In 1854, while under the ownership of the Commonwealth, the island’s use took a turn beginning sixty-six years as an off-shore repository for Boston’s unwanted. Its inmates were victims of: poverty, lack of health care, mental illness, senility, addiction, lack of proper housing, poor sanitary conditions, inability to pay a small fine, men unable to find work, incarcerated as paupers, and unwed pregnant women.
We note 2 heroes: Alice Lincoln and Louis Brandeis. Their efforts resulted in the Cityending Rainsford Island as a warehouse for the poor, the unwanted, and the mentally ill. Rainsford entered its final 26 years as the Boys’ House of Reformation. Further examples of inept management, cruelty, neglect, and death, of “Unfortunate” boys ages eight to eighteen are documented. Sentences ranged from playing ball on Sundays to murder. Those boys were commingled on the 11 acre island.
His book is dedicated to the memory of all who were sent to Rainsford Island, especially those who remain buried there, still neglected but now not forgotten. This book dedicates a chapter to those that never left the island in unmarked graves, including a War of 1812 Sailor; 9 Civil War soldiers who died on active duty; and 108 Veterans of the Civil War who died between 1873 and 1893. 14 of those Veterans were African American, one was a member of the 54th Mass Regt.
Matthew Dickey: Saving History with the Boston Preservation Alliance (episode 205)
Oct 04, 2020
Vote for us as the “Fan Favorite” at this year’s Boston Preservation Awards!
This week, Jake sits down with Matthew Dickey, the Communications and Operations Manager at the Boston Preservation Alliance to discuss the organization’s important work in saving the historic nature of Boston’s many diverse neighborhoods. They fight to preserve individual buildings of historic importance, but they also work to keep the cohesion of historic neighborhoods and raise awareness with the public through efforts like the Boston Preservation Awards. Stay tuned to the end to learn how you can attend this year’s virtual awards ceremony, where HUB History will be one of the nine honorees.
Though she is better known for the book Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back, Brookline native and Boston Globe architecture critic Jane Holtz Kay’s first book was all about the history of Boston’s architecture and what has been lost. Originally published in 1980 and updated in 1999, the bluntly titled Lost Boston sticks with the theme of preservation, blending prose with historic photos and maps to uncover some of the grand public buildings, cozy backstreets, and iconic details like neon signs and storefronts that have fallen in the name of the greater good.
A 1980 review by Henry B Leonard of Kent State gave the book high marks, saying
For enthusiasts of the Hub’s built landscape, Lost Boston is a book which will both delight and inform. A longtime resident of the city and student of Boston’s art and architecture and presently architecture critic for The Nation, Jane Holtz Kay has scoured the collections of numerous institutions to assemble a fascinating collection of photographs which bring back to life both the buildings and, more important, the broad visual aspects of the city which have been vandalized in the name of “progress .” This is no dry architectural survey. Rather, Ms. Kay attempts, with great success, to recreate Boston as a work of collective art, as the joint product of its diverse and active citizenry, from the city’s seventeenth century foundations to the 1930s. She effectively brackets lively essays, which describe the historical, architectural and environmental developments of the city, with photographic portfolios which are organized around particular themes… As the book’s title suggests, virtually all of the photographs are of buildings and prospects now gone. For anyone who knows today’s Boston, Ms. Kay’s comparison of the past with the present is startling and, unfortunately, depressing as well.
You may also want to check out this CSpan video of an illustrated talk Jane Holtz Kay gave at the BPL in the year 2000. Drawing on the research she did for Lost Boston, you’ll see many of the images that were used in the book, and you’ll get a more unvarnished take on Boston’s so-called progress, unmoderated by the influence of her editors at Houghton Mifflin.
Peace in Boston After the Civil War (episode 204)
Sep 27, 2020
Vote for us as the “Fan Favorite” at this year’s Boston Preservation Awards!
Since last week’s show was about Boston’s 1851 Railroad Jubilee, which was an enormous celebration at a time when the nation was in the midst of a rush toward civil war, it seemed appropriate to discuss the Grand Peace Jubilee this week. Held in Boston in 1869, when the war was still a raw wound on the American psyche, the Peace Jubilee was a musical spectacular unlike anything the world had ever seen. Composer Patrick Gilmore hoped to bind the country together and help it heal… and if he happened to get rich in the process, that would just be icing on the cake. This week’s show also revisits another peacetime memory of the Civil War in Boston. In 1903, after the pain of the Civil War had dulled, Boston gathered at what is now the “General Hooker Entrance” to the State House to dedicate a statue to the highest ranking general from Massachusetts during the war.
The “waffle pattern” photo
Members of the anvil chorus pose in the Public Garden
1869 Exterior
1872 Exterior
1869 Interior
1872 Interior
September 1869
September 1869
September 1869
1872 exterior; simulated 3d via NYPL’s stereogranimator
1872 interior; simulated 3d via NYPL’s stereogranimator
Hooker Day
Hooker mounted in 1903
Master Joseph Hooker Wood and the sculptors
Route of the parade
Recalling Hooker’s glory days
The State House decked out in bunting with a shrouded statue
Ready for the unveiling
Legislation authorizing the erection of a statue of General Hooker at the State House.
You may remember that almost exactly a year ago, we featured an excellent series of articles by “The Passionate Foodie,” aka Richard Auffrey, about the history of Chinatown and Chinese restaurants in Boston. Auffrey is back this month with another series of three (so far) articles about the history of Syrian-Americans and Syerian restaurants in Boston, from the 1880s to the present day. They start with a wave of Syrian immigration to Boston in the 1880s, with a new “little Syria” springing up around what’s now Ping-On Alley off Essex Street in Chinatown. From the first mentions of a Syrian restaurant in the press in 1899, Auffrey walks through the menu offerings of a 19th century Syrian-American restaurant, from Kubbe to Yabrak to ice cream. He uses the rise of Syrian restaurants to follow the growth of the local Syrian-American population and the size of Little Syria.
After summarizing the Syrian restaurant scene through the 1920s, the next article dives into the history of one specific restaurant. The long-shuttered Sahara Restaurant in the South End originally opened in 1965, and (for somewhat murky reasons) closed again in 1972. Amazingly, the sign has remained up over the door ever since, and the same family has owned the building since at least the early 70s, and maybe since the restaurant originally opened.
Finally, the third article discusses a Hudson Street restaurant called “the Nile.” When it was open from the late 1930s through the late 60s, it was referred to as “the most famous syrian restaurant this side of the pyramids,” at least in their own marketing materials. As Auffrey points out in the article, it’s a bit odd that they chose to name their restaurant after the Nile river and refer to the pyramids in their marketing, because neither of those things existed in Syria. However, during the era when the restaurant opened, Egypt was about the closest reference most Americans had for the Middle East, so the Salem (sah-laem) family who owned the joint just rolled with it. At first they served mostly the 16,000 or so Syrian immigrants who lived in Boston in the 1930s and 40s, but expanded the business as word of their delicious lamb skewers and lubiah stew spread among Yankee Boston. Head chef Deeb “George” Salem was an expert pastry chef, and he may have been responsible for introducing baclava to the Boston palate.
Using his typical style of mining newspaper databases and examining old menus, Richard Auffrey traces the rising popularity of the restaurant through its increasing nightly capacity, as well as the string of celebrity guests, including movie stars, the Kennedys, and the Saudi royal family. He also weaves in details of how the Arab-Israeli conflict affected staff at the restaurant, how urban renewal in Boston impacted the location of the restaurant, and the eventual decline and bankruptcy of the restaurant.
October 1st: You may recall that in episode 132, we described how in 1745, a volunteer army of Massachusetts militia, through good leadership, gallant conduct, and sheer dumb luck, managed to defeat the French fortress Louisbourg, the strongest fortress in North America at the time. While our podcast talked a bit about the thought process behind Royal Governor William Shirley’s decision to besiege the fortress, we focused more on the tactics of the battlefield, and the results of the victory. In the talk “Rule Britannia: Imperial Patriots and the Siege of Louisbourg of 1745,” Amy Watson, of the University of Southern California will focus on the men who joined the siege and their political motivations. Here’s how the MHS describes the event:
In 1745, a group of New England volunteers who called themselves Patriots launched an expedition against the French fortress of Louisbourg, in present-day Nova Scotia. Who were these “Patriots”? What did they want with Louisbourg? And what can this incident tell us about British imperial politics in the mid-eighteenth century? This expedition reveals that the British Empire was dividing on sharp partisan lines in the 1740s, laying the groundwork for the revolutionary decades to come.
October 7: Come see me give a talk for Old North Church Historic Site about the lost tunnels of the North End, on Wednesday, October 7 at 7pm. It will be a lot like the podcast, except you’ll be able to see me and my slides, you won’t have to consult the show notes for the visual aids I want to share, and I won’t be able to edit out all my embarrassing ums and ahs and awkward pauses. Here’s how Old North is describing the event:
If you’ve ever taken a walking tour of Boston’s North End, or if you’ve talked to the old timers in the neighborhood, you’ve probably heard stories about the network of so-called secret pirate tunnels or smugglers’ tunnels that connects the wharves to the basements of houses, Old North Church, and even crypts in Copp’s Hill burying ground. Sometimes the tunnels are attributed to a Captain Gruchy, who’s often called a pirate or a smuggler, and who is portrayed as a shadowy figure. The legends of pirate tunnels in the North End were inspired by a few subterranean discoveries in the late 1800s, but the fantastic details in stories told by tour guides and popular authors are just that: fantasy. However, there is truth underlying the legends, and there are tunnels underlying the streets of the North End.
October 15: One of the few bright spots in this pandemic season is that the Boston Preservation Alliance will hold the ceremony for their Boston Preservation Awards online this year, and it will be open to all. That means you can come hang out as HUB History wins a Preservation Award in the Advocacy Project category. Here’s what the Alliance said about us:
Boston has always been a city built on history: museums, iconic buildings, and monuments are an essential part of the city’s self-definition and tourism draw. Today more than ever, that history spreads beyond physical places. The Hub History Podcast tells the stories of Boston’s history through a medium that has surged in popularity. The talented duo that produces the podcast bring Boston history alive by making the past accessible and relevant to a wide audience, far beyond the bounds of familiar sites.
“The means to engage people with the history of Boston have grown dramatically, and the Hub History podcast is a wonderful way to expand the connection of the broader public to our past,” says Greg Galer, Executive Director of the Boston Preservation Alliance. “The more people who are informed and enthusiastically connected to the stories of the places and people of Boston, the more engagement we have with the desire to preserve these places for future generations. To understand a historic place and the events that happened there is to recognize its value and its connections to lessons valuable to us today.”
We hope that you’ll attend the awards ceremony, but even if you don’t please vote for us as the preservation awards’ “Fan Favorite.” Each unique email address can vote once each day, so please vote early and often, and help us take home a second award!
In September 1851, Boston threw an enormous party, a party big enough to span three days. After 15 years of development, the railroad network centered on Boston stretched out in every direction, linking the port of Boston to the American Midwest and the interior of Canada, with the Cunard line’s steamers giving access to markets in England. To celebrate the new era of railroading, the city threw a grand Railroad Jubilee and invited President Millard Fillmore, the Governor General of Canada, and dignitaries from all over the country. Besides commerce and steam locomotives, this episode will highlight a growing split within the Whigs old political party; Boston’s ever-present competition with New York City; and the seemingly unavoidable rush toward a civil war over the question of slavery.
A recollection of Lord Elgin’s visit to Boston by George H Mills, president of the Wentworth (Ontario) historical society in 1892, who attended the Jubilee and owned the Victoria Fire Insurance Co.
A panorama of the Grand Procession
Tremont St (top) and inside the tent on Boston Common (bottom)
State St and the Old State House (bottom)
The tent on Boston Common
Boston City Hall decorated for the Railroad Jubilee
Dover Street during the Railroad Jubilee
Published in 2011, A City So Grand: The Rise of an American Metropolis, Boston 1850-1900, by Stephen Puleo is one of my favorite books about Boston, and the first place I read about Boston’s railroad jubilee. This book helped me turn an interest in Boston history into a tour company, and eventually into the podcast you’re listening to right now. The book traces the development of Boston in the second half of the 19th century in broad strokes, from the rescue of accused fugitive Shadrach Minkins to the sudden influx of Irish immigrants to the construction of America’s first subway. Here’s how the author’s website describes the book:
The second half of the nineteenth century is, quite simply, a breathtaking period in Boston’s history. Unlike the frustrations of our modern era, in which the notion of accomplishing great things often appears overwhelming or even impossible, Boston distinguished itself between 1850 and 1900 by proving it could tackle and overcome the most arduous of challenges and obstacles with repeated, and often resounding, success.
A City So Grand chronicles this breathtaking period in Boston’s history for the first time. Readers will experience the abolitionist movement of the 1850s, the 35-year engineering and city-planning feat of the Back Bay project, the arrival of the Irish that transformed Boston demographically, the Great Fire of 1872 and the subsequent rebuilding of downtown, Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of the telephone in Boston, and the many contributions Boston made to shaping transportation, including the Great Railroad Jubilee of 1851 and the grand opening of America’s first subway. These stories and many more paint an extraordinary portrait of a half-century of progress, leadership, and influence that redefined Boston as a world-class city.
Upcoming Events
September 23:Royall House and Slave Quarters in Medford is hosting an online discussion titled “Acts of Rebellion and Envisioning a New Society.” The talk will feature Dr. Vincent Brown, who teaches American and African American History at Harvard, and Dr. Timothy McCarthy, who is a human rights activist on the faculty of the Kennedy School. Together, they’ll talk “about the role of protests and revolts in shaping Black resistance and freedom movements from slave rebellions in the 18th-century Atlantic world, to the Black Lives Matter Movement today.” Registration for the interactive Zoom event is limited to the first 100 people, though it will also be livestreamed on Facebook in case of an overflow crowd.
September 29: Throughout the 250th anniversary year of the Boston Massacre, Revolutionary Spaces is hosting events in a series called Reflecting Attucks, as they explore the life and world of Boston Massacre victim Crispus Attucks. The next event in the series is titled “Imagining Attucks,” and it will focus on how Attucks has been portrayed in visual media like paintings and engravings. As an African American man, Crispus Attucks didn’t fit the narrative that artists of the time like Henry Pelham and Paul Revere tried to portray with their engravings of the massacre, so he was left out of the picture in the 18th century. When Attucks was “rediscovered” in the 19th century, artists painted him back into the picture, with each successive generation projecting their own values onto the canvas. The panelists for this talk will include a playwright who is writing a show about Crispus Attucks, the living history interpreter who plays him in the Boston Massacre reenactment each year, and the author of a book about Crispus Attucks in American Memory.
September 30: Our friends at the Partnership of Historic Bostons are presenting another event in their Charter Day series. The Partnership is dedicated to telling the stories of Boston, Massachusetts and Boston, Lincolnshire, which usually means that they focus very heavily on the lived experiences of the 17th century Puritans who came from the town in Lincolnshire to found the town in Massachusetts. This time, they will be taking a very different approach to the history of 17th century Boston, by highlighting the experiences of the indigenous peoples who lived along the shores of the Massachusetts Bay before the Puritans arrived. Their guest speaker will be Dr. Larry Fisher, PhD and Council Chief Sachem, who bears the traditional name Chief Sachem Wompimeequin Wampatuck. Dr. Fisher is a direct descendent of the Grand Sachem Chickatawbut, who we have discussed on the show, and “the Presiding Council Chief Sâchem for the Mattakeeset Tribe of the Massachuset Indian Nation and Ambassador Delegate to the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues on behalf of the Mattakeeset Massachuset.”
The land, from the Merrimack and beyond, south to the Taunton river was shared among the Massachuset Nation which includes todays known surviving tribes: the Mattakeeset, Natick, Ponkapoag and Nemasket. Chief Sachem Larry Fisher and other spokespersons will examine the partially-interpreted history of 16th and 17th century Massachusetts, up to the present. We believe all aspects of our common history shall be preserved and remembered together. We recognize that only with inclusion, honesty and honoring our individual and distinctive tribal histories, will we truly achieve our mission: to bring harmony and education to the whole organization receiving this message.
Boston Transportation Firsts (episode 202)
Sep 13, 2020
Co-host emerita Nikki and I are camping this weekend, so instead of a brand new episode, we’re giving you three classic stories about advances in transportation in Boston. First up, we’re going to take a look at a precursor to today’s MBTA. In the late 19th century, a bold entrepreneur built a full sized, working monorail in East Cambridge, but failed to convince the city to adopt it for public transportation. Then, inspired by last week’s show about the World Fliers, our second story will be about the first people to take to the skies in Boston. In the early 19th century, daring aeronauts made a series of increasingly ambitious balloon ascents in Boston. Finally, we’ll turn the clock back to the 1780s, just as the Revolutionary War was concluding. At the time, the town of Boston was on a tiny peninsula, almost completely surrounded by water. The ferry connecting Boston to the mainland struggled to keep up with demand, and Bostonians were looking for a better way… but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.
Just for fun, here are a few pictures from the time your hosts went soaring in New Hampshire, including the Boston skyline from somewhere near Salem, NH.
In Episode 80 of the Dispatches podcast from the Journal of the American Revolution, host Brady Crytzer sits down with former White House webmaster and author Jane Hampton Cook to discuss one of our favorite Americans. As the wife of one US President and mother of another, Abigail Adams’ private influence could often be seen in public discourse and policy. For example, John Quincy Adams’ lifelong crusade against slavery was no doubt inspired by the mother who wrote in 1774 that she wished most sincerely that there was not a slave in the province.
The correspondence between Abigail Adams and John is one of the most powerful glimpses into our founding era, and from three decades of letters, the most famous words Abigail wrote were “remember the ladies.” In a series of letters written while John was attending the Second Continental Congress in the spring of 1776, Abigail constantly urged him to get Congress to declare an American independency. In one of them, she considered what would come after independence, and suggested a new role for women in the new society. On March 31, 1776, she wrote:
By the way, in the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If perticuliar care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.
That your Sex are Naturally Tyrannical is a Truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute, but such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of Master for the more tender and endearing one of Friend. Why then, not put it out of the power of the vicious and the lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity with impunity. Men of Sense in all Ages abhor those customs which treat us only as the vassals of your Sex.
In his response, John called Abigail “saucy,” and he essentially ignored her suggestion to incorporate rights for women in the new code of laws. It would take nearly 150 more years to pass the 19th amendment granting women the right to vote in America. In the podcast, Cook explores what John’s dismissal of Abigail Adams’ most famous letter tells us about her role in promoting women’s rights in the early republic.
A key figure in American foreign policy for three decades, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. of Massachusetts, a well-heeled Eastern Establishment Republican, put duty over partisanship to serve as advisor to five presidents from Dwight Eisenhower to Gerald Ford and as United States Ambassador to the United Nations, Vietnam, West Germany, and the Vatican. Historian Luke A. Nichter gives us a compelling narrative of Lodge’s extraordinary and consequential life and his immense political influence.
Tune in at 5:30pm on Monday, September 21 to learn about the oft-overlooked younger Henry Cabot Lodge.
Revolutionary Spaces operates both Old South Meeting House and the Old State House, including the site of the Boston Massacre. As part of their commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the massacre this year, the Reflecting Attucks series explores different aspects of the life and times of Crispus Attucks, who has become the most famous victim of the Boston Massacre. Here’s how they describe this installment:
“Attucks and the Politics of Liberty & Sovereignty in 18th Century New England” reflects on the political conversations that were taking place around the time of the Boston Massacre among white colonists and the African- and Native-descended communities. The Revolutionary period is most often associated with colonists arguing for their rights as British subjects to tax themselves under a locally elected government, but that is only part of the story. Blacks were also seeking to make the case for liberty to end the practice of slavery, while Native peoples continued to reclaim their sovereignty after more than a century of colonial expansion.
That talk will begin at 4pm on Tuesday, September 22.
On September 7, 1630, Boston, Dorchester, and Watertown were all officially named, and the anniversary always kicks off a month or more of terrific programming from the Partnership of Historic Bostons. As the name suggests, the partnership celebrates the historical connections between Boston, Massachusetts and Boston, Lincolnshire. Their mission is to educate people about the 17th century history of both Bostons, and their peak season kicks off with Charter Day.
2 governors. 2 colonies. 4 moments that defined a decade. Join expert staff from Plimoth-Patuxet (formerly Plimoth Plantation) and the Center for 17th-Century Studies at Plimoth for an immersive exploration of the complicated relationship between Plymouth Colony’s William Bradford and Massachusetts Bay Colony’s John Winthrop. Delving into their personal correspondence and published writings from the 1630s, Plimoth brings its unique approach to living history to bear in an exploration of each man’s unique approach to leadership and community in New England’s earliest decades.
The World Fliers in Boston (episode 201)
Sep 06, 2020
The early 20th century was a time of aviation firsts, and one of those firsts dropped into Boston for three long, exciting days in 1924. Five months after they started their journey in California, the Army Air Service pilots who made the first flight around the world were expected to touch down on US soil for the first time 96 years ago this week.
Since the main story this week is about the first people to circumnavigate the globe by air, it seems only appropriate to feature the first solo circumnavigation by sea. On September 2, Stuff You Missed in History released an episode about Captain Joshua Slocum, who was the first person to sail around the world alone. Slocum first went to sea 35 years before his attempted circumnavigation, leaving Nova Scotia at the age of 16. Over the years, he met and married an American woman living in Australia, and the pair sailed together for 13 years, raising seven children at sea, four of whom lived to adulthood. After his first wife died in 1884, Slocum remarried and began calling Boston home, while continuing to sail between the US east coast and Brazil regularly.
I had never read about the time in Joshua Slocum’s life before his solo voyage before, and hosts Tracy and Holly do a great job describing this period. You’ll be left wishing that you had met his first wife Ginny, who seemed able to do it all, holding off mutineers at gunpoint with one hand, playing piano with the other, teaching Sunday school with a third hand, and giving birth alone at sea with… well I guess that wasn’t a hand.
All that is to say that Joshua Slocum was a master mariner and experienced navigator, so when he announced in 1895 that he planned to sail a small vessel around the world alone, it didn’t sound as crazy as it would if you or I said it. He bought a small sloop near New Bedford that had been used for oyster fishing and spent more than a year overhauling it and fitting it out for long distance sailing.
In the end, the journey took three years, and after his return, Slocum published a memoir titled Sailing Alone Around the World.
Upcoming Events
Katherine Switzer has been the subject of two past episodes, and on September 15, she’ll be taking part in the BPL’s Contested Perspectives series. Here’s how the library describes it:
In 1967, Katherine Switzer became the first woman to officially run the Boston Marathon as a numbered entrant. During her run, race official Jock Semple attempted to stop Switzer and grab her official bib; however, he was shoved to the ground by Switzer’s boyfriend, Thomas Miller, who was running with her, and she completed the race. It was not until 1972 that women were allowed to run the Boston Marathon officially. Fifty years later, Kathrine Switzer successfully ran the Boston Marathon again at age 70.
She’ll join the library’s virtual talk “to discuss these barrier-breaking moments on the racecourse and in life.”
On September 16, past podcast guests Joseph Nevins, Suren Moodliar, and Eleni Macrakis will be giving a virtual author talk via the library. A People’s Guide to Greater Boston is a radical’s travel guide to Boston. If you missed our interview with Joseph and Suren, or if you’re still mad that Eleni got left out, this will be your introduction to the guide.
Also on September 16, Revolutionary Spaces will host an online installment in their “Reflecting Attucks” series, the organization’s year of programming remembering the most famous Boston Massacre victim. This event will start at 4pm, and it’s a panel discussion that features Kerri Greenidge, biographer of William Monroe Trotter past podcast guest. Here’s how Revolutionary Spaces describes this edition of Reflecting Attucks.
Attucks: A Man of Many Worlds unpacks what we know about Attucks’s time and place. He lived in a world where many people were descended from both Native and African peoples that had much in common, including enslavement at the hands of white colonists. With this background, Attucks would have had a deep understanding of British oppression, and how his community fought back. And as a mariner going through the port of Boston, he would have encountered people both Black and white making the case for liberty and freedom in louder and more certain terms.
Join us for a lively discussion about Attucks’s Afro-Indian community and reflect on the experiences he might have had that informed his thinking about resistance and protest and ultimately brought him to King Street on the night of the Boston Massacre
Dr. Rebecca Crumpler, Forgotten No Longer (episode 200)
Aug 30, 2020
Dr. Rebecca Davis Lee Crumpler was the first Black woman to earn a medical degree in the US in 1864, and she spent most of her adult life in Charlestown, Beacon Hill, and the Readville section of Hyde Park. She devoted her career to pediatrics and obstetrics, published the first medical text by an African American author, and made a point of caring for the marginalized, even moving to Virginia to tend to formerly enslaved people at the end of the Civil War. The nation’s first Black female physician lay in an unmarked grave for 125 years, but there have been important developments in the story of Dr. Crumpler while we’ve been in quarantine this year.
The quote about studying too hard damaging a woman’s uterus is from this article on the history of women in medicine
A 1912 map of Hyde Park, showing Sunnyside Ave (now Solaris Road) where the Crumplers resided, directly across the Mother Brook from their graves at Fairview Cemetery
Confused when we talk about the Mother Brook? Check out episode 91.
The New England Female Medical College campus
New England Female Medical College
A course certificate for the New England Female Medical College
Dr Rebecca Crumpler, plot A-90
Arthur Crumpler, plot A-91
Boston Book Club
Remember restaurants? Not takeout, not patio seating, not eating under a tent in a reclaimed parking space, but real restaurants? I do… barely. If you’re having trouble remembering what restaurants were like, check out Dining Out in Boston: A Culinary History. Author James O’Connell analyzes restaurant menus dating back to the early 1800s to show how Boston restaurants helped to develop America’s tastes and expectations in restaurant dining.
Upcoming Event
Longtime listeners know that I’m a big fan of John Adams, and I spend a lot of time in the online Adams papers. At noon on Thursday, September 10, University of Tennessee-Knoxville PhD candidate Yiyun Huang will be presenting on the topic “John Adams and China: Globalizing Early America.”
The talk draws on Yiyun’s dissertation, which is tentatively titled “‘Nothing but large potions of Tea could extinguish it’: Cultural Transfer and the Consumption of Chinese Tea in Early America.” The title is taken from a 1757 diary entry by John Adams, where he notes that only Chinese tea can sooth his chronic heartburn. He was just one of many Americans who relied on tea for its medical benefits prior to December 1770. But why did Adams and his contemporaries believe tea was beneficial? In a description of his doctoral work, Huang says,
I trace the cultural ties that bound Qing-dynasty China and British North America during the eighteenth-century. I argue that British colonists in North America consumed a great deal of Chinese tea before the American Revolution due to a robust global transfer of ideas, attitudes, and beliefs associated with this tea. It took multiple transoceanic networks of physicians, Jesuit missionaries, and merchants to transmit academic and vernacular knowledge of Chinese tea across the globe.
As with most Massachusetts Historical Society talks, this one is free, but advanced registration is required.
The Clipper Ships of East Boston (episode 199)
Aug 23, 2020
Kick back and enjoy our interview with Stephen Ujifusa, author of Barons of the Sea, and Their Race to Build the World’s Fastest Clipper Ship, which originally aired in July 2018. Stephen takes us back to an era when the fastest, most elegant ships in the world were built in the East Boston shipyard of Donald McKay. He also describes how they were used to trade for tea in China or gold in California, and how they helped America’s most prominent families amass fortunes through opium smuggling.
We’ve done not one but two episodes about the 1721 smallpox inoculation controversy in Boston without reading Steven Coss’s book The Fever of 1721: The Epidemic That Revolutionized Medicine and American Politics. It promises to weave together three threads in Boston history. In 1721, Boston was wracked by a smallpox epidemic that prompted Cotton Mather and Zabadiel Boylston to begin inoculating residents against the disease using a method they used from Oneismus, who was enslaved by Mather. It was also the year when James Franklin launched a new newspaper called the New-England Courant, the first independent paper in the colonies, where his famous brother Ben would learn the publishing trade. Coss also argues that 1721 was the year when Boston’s sentiments began turning against crown government.
Though it (like the book) was written in 2016, this review in American Scientist has heavy shades of America 2020:
Although the book’s eponymous fever is smallpox—and smallpox does frame the events described in the book—writer and independent scholar Coss maintains that another kind of fever marks 1721 as pivotal in American history. Just as smallpox was beginning to take hold in Boston, James Franklin, elder brother of a more famous Franklin, launched the first independent newspaper in the colonies, The New-England Courant. Its emergence marked the beginning of a nascent nation’s obsession with partisan broadsheets. And thanks to the coincidence of timing, the newspaper’s editorial focus at its launch reflected deep concern with the disease taking hold of the city. Moreover, it provides perhaps the earliest example of an independent press covering a colonial epidemic in ways not officially sanctioned by the government. The tensions between an honest reporting of a disease’s spread and the government’s desire to downplay both the risk and its own culpability in the outbreak are in full view in Coss’s history. Although Boston’s relationship with the Crown had long been tumultuous—a circumstance evident as early as 1689, when Bostonians deposed their royal governor—Coss makes a convincing argument that the introduction of a partisan, independent press in the first half of the 18th century was either a cause or a consequence of an underlying dissatisfaction that led directly to the events of the second half.
Upcoming Events
On Thursday, August 27, History Camp will host a virtual author talk with Dan Gifford about his book The Last Voyage of the Whaling Bark Progress: New Bedford, Chicago and the Twilight of an Industry. I had to pass on interviewing Dan about the book a while back, because Boston didn’t feature heavily enough. If your definition of greater Boston to is broad enough to include Salem and New Bedford, this should talk is for you. Here’s how Dan described the book in an email to me:
My new book recreates the strange story of the whaling bark Progress — a New Bedford whaler transformed into a whaling museum for Chicago’s 1893 world’s fair. Traversing waterways across North America, the whaleship enthralled crowds from Montreal to Racine. Her ultimate fate, however, was to be a failed sideshow of marine curiosities and a metaphor for a dying industry out of step with Gilded Age America. After the fair is over, the whaling artifacts from the Progress end up at the Field Museum and the curators rebel against a whaling exhibit in their brand-new museum. Within a few years everything is packed onto an express train and shipped off to Salem [what’s now the Peabody-Essex Museum] as a gift! This book uses the story of the Progress to detail the rise, fall, and eventual demise of the whaling industry in America. The legacy of this whaling bark can be found throughout New England and Chicago, and invites questions about what it means to transform a dying industry into a museum piece.
History Camp virtual events are conducted on Facebook Live, so just head over to their profile at 8pm on Thursday, August 27 to see the conversation live.
In “Victory at Last? Parades and Pink Slips,” three area Ntional Park Service sites are getting together to host a symposium exploring the rapid economic, social, and political change brought on by the end of World War II in 1945. Speakers from the Boston National Historic Park, Blackstone River Valley NHP, and Lowell NHP will give a series of brief talks titled “Patriotism or Prejudice?: Discrimination at the Charlestown Navy Yard,” “Femmes and Homes: French-Canadian Women in RI and Post-WWII Housing,” “Women at War, at Home: Lowell During World War II,” and “Boston Female Shipbuilders, Post-War.” When the speakers conclude, there will be a panel discussion and time for audience questions. The event begins at 1pm on Saturday, August 29.
When the US Army Invaded South Boston (episode 198)
Aug 16, 2020
In the 1940s, Boston was still an industrial city, and when the US entered World War II, that industrial might would be turned to wartime production. With industry comes labor disputes, and a new government agency was given extraordinary powers to resolve them. In other early cases, the National War Labor Board used its authority and the might of the military to break strikes by organized labor. However, in August 1942, they would step in to force an employer to honor their union contract, using the US Army to enforce workers’ rights. That employer was the SA Woods Machine Company of South Boston, and this Wednesday marks the anniversary of the military takeover of their plant, setting up an epic battle of wills between the SA Woods corporation and the US government, and between the company’s cantankerous president and the young major sent to take over his company.
The MPs arrive at SA Woods
Nailing Executive order 9225 to the door
Guarding the front gates
Meet the new management
Lining up to go to work
Checking IDs
Fake labor negotiations
A help wanted ad from the Murray company’s operation of SA Woods
During the 1983 Boston City Council race, WGBH was given extraordinary behind-the-scenes access to one candidate’s campaign, as he ran for office for the first time. The council had just been restructured, introducing a new District Councilor seat. Before this, all nine city councilors were elected at large, meaning that they had to run city-wide. With the restructuring, there would now be four at-large councilors and nine district councilors, who would be elected by the residents of specific neighborhoods. This first time candidate, named Tom Menino, was running to represent Hyde Park and Roslindale in District 5.
There’s a charming segment where the camera goes behind the scenes in the future councilor’s basement, as he rehearses the speech announcing his candidacy over and over again to a small audience of family and friends. His wife Angela gently corrects his pronunciation, then the scene shifts to his parents’ backyard in Hyde Park, where he is delivering the speech for real. As he stumbles over the same word again, the camera cuts to Angela, who stares directly into the camera and gives a little smirk that would make the writers of The Office proud.
For an episode that will be focusing on manufacturing in Boston, it’s interesting to hear future mayor Menino discuss the role that one of the large factories in the Readville section of Hyde Park played in his family and the neighborhood. He describes how his father, three of his aunts, and his neighbors had all worked at Westinghouse making industrial fans. Even young Tommy had worked there for a few summers, though he mentions that the company is having financial difficulties. Of course, the old Westinghouse plant is now condos, and a charter school, and the offices for a few small businesses.
The show closes on election night, as the candidate and his staff count the votes coming in from individual precincts. By now it’s not a spoiler to say that Tommy Menino won that race. He would go on to the Mayor’s office in 1994 and end up as the city’s longest-serving mayor.
Upcoming Event(s)
On August 26, the USS Constitution Museum will be presenting a virtual panel discussion about using naval power to secure commercial shipping around the world, from the time of the Constitution’s campaign against the Barbary pirates to the rising tensions with China over access to the South China Sea. The panelists will include Professor Robert Allison of Suffolk University, Professor James Holmes of the US Naval War College, and Professor Rockford Weitz of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. They will be moderated by the Constitution Museum’s public historian, Carl Herzog.
Here’s how the museum describes the event:
Throughout the first half of the 1800s, USS Constitution was deployed to locations around the globe to protect American maritime commerce and interests. Keeping seaways open and safe for American ships passing through far flung locales was a fundamental goal in the creation of the US Navy and USS Constitution. Today, US Navy ships are still stationed and patrolling waters around the world to protect maritime commerce and freedom of navigation in increasingly volatile regions such as the South China Sea.
In a virtual panel discussion on August 26, the USS Constitution Museum brings together three experts to discuss Constitution’s history protecting maritime commerce and how that legacy is reflected in the deployments of US Navy ships to tense sea lanes around the world today. What lessons does “Old Ironsides” offer us for guidance in understanding overseas naval presence today? How do global issues of maritime security affect commerce coming to and from American shores today and how does that compare to the 19th-century commerce Constitution sought to protect?
Though it’s last minute notice, Old North will present an illustrated talk by Alex Goldfield on Tuesday, August 19. He’ll speak on the topic of Black freedom in early Boston, retracing the lives of free and enslaved African Americans in the first decades of our city. Old North’s description says:
Public historian and local author Alex Goldfeld will give an illustrated presentation on Boston’s African-American community in the 1600s. He will draw on his graduate research in The History of the Streets of Boston’s North End to speak about life for Boston’s earliest black residents. The audience will get glimpses of free Black Bostonians as well as efforts to control them by law throughout Massachusetts.
One morning in August, redcoats fanned out across the province, taking entire families into custody, burning farms and crops, and killing livestock. Falling in the middle of two centuries of intermittent warfare, this grand derangement, or great upheaval, didn’t take place in Boston or even in Massachusetts. But Boston bore responsibility for the acts carried out in its name, and Boston would host the “French Neutrals,” the human byproducts of the purge that we remember as the expulsion of the Acadians who were confined in our city for nearly a decade.
Longfellow’s Evangelineis a book that did more than any other work in English to draw attention to the plight of the Acadians who were removed from their homeland in the Grand Derangement. As the curators of what is now known as the Longfellow House/Washington’s Headquarters National Historic site point out:
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow began writing the “idyl in hexameters” which would become Evangeline in November of 1845, shortly after the birth of his second child. He was a respected professor who had been teaching foreign languages at Harvard for almost ten years, and a published author and translator fluent in many European languages, classical Greek, and Latin. He had recently married his second wife, the wealthy and beautiful Fanny Appleton, and the two were living in the impressive Cambridge mansion known locally as the Craigie House.
Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie tells the story, in unrhymed verse, of the young and beautiful Evangeline and the noble Gabriel Lajeunesse, childhood friends living in Grand-Pré, Nova Scotia. The two are members of a peaceful farming community that embodies all the values of virtuous rural life held dear by the Victorian audience for whom the poem was written. They are engaged to be married, but are almost immediately separated when their entire community is forced into exile. Following the harrowing scene of their ejection, Evangeline spends the rest of her life traveling throughout North America, hoping to be reunited with her one true love. Only after many years of fruitless searching does Evangeline find Gabriel, on his deathbed. After a moment of mutual recognition, Gabriel dies, held by Evangeline as she thanks God for bringing them together one last time. The poem concludes with the assurance that the two lovers, are buried side by side, together for eternity, with Evangeline’s devotion to be celebrated in the land of their birth forever.
While I personally find it boring and hard to read today, in his own time, Longfellow’s Evangeline was a cultural phenomenon. It went through six printings in the first six months, selling out time and again and putting tens of thousands of copies into print. The poem’s success cemented Longfellow’s reputation and fortune, and it helped reintroduce the saga of the Derangement into American popular history.
Upcoming Event
Two decades after the crisis of loyalty that led to the expulsion of the Acadians, war would break out again. In her talk “Interpreting Neutrality during the American Revolution in the Northeast Borderlands,” Darcy Stevens of the University of Maine will examine what neutrality looked like in the same region that had been wracked so recently by the Grand Derangement. Here’s how the MHS describes her talk:
Rebellion, neutrality and loyalty existed on a spectrum that inhabitants in the Borderlands of Maine and Nova Scotia moved along throughout the war. Likewise, British and American officials’ interpretations and acceptance of neutrality was malleable. Examining neutrals, rebels, loyalists, New England Planters, Wabanaki, and Acadians in the Borderlands reveals factors which impacted personal decisions and official policy about neutrality. Recognizing the complexity of neutrality restores agency to individuals and suggests a new terrain for assessing revolutionary actors as they were buffeted by wartime change.
The virtual event begins at noon on August 20. It’s free, but advanced registration is required to get access to the connection details.
The Gold Gilded Grasshopper (episode 196)
Aug 02, 2020
Faneuil Hall’s grasshopper weathervane is 4 feet long, weighs about 80 pounds, and is made out of copper that’s been covered with 23 carat gold. It’s found at the top of an 8 foot spire above Faneuil Hall’s cupola, which is in turn seven stories above ground level. So imagine the surprise that swept Boston on a January day in 1974 when people looked up and realized that the grasshopper was gone.
The Grasshopper
Faneuil Hall from above
The flagpole in Feb 1974
Shem Drowne’s first weathervane
Shem Drowne’s 1740 weathervane at Old North
The Grasshopper
Since Faneuil Hall is at the center of this week’s story, this week’s Boston Book Club selection will give you a broader history of Boston’s premier market. Strictly speaking, Faneuil Hall is the single brick building that opened in 1742 on the former site of Boston’s town dock. But when people say they’re going to Faneuil Hall, they probably mean that they’ll also visit the 19th century granite market building behind Faneuil Hall, and perhaps the former warehouses that flank it on either side. This entire market complex is Quincy Market, named after Boston Mayor Josiah Quincy III. It opened 84 years after the original market site, in 1826.
Quincy’s Market: a Boston Landmark was written by John Quincy, Jr, an eleventh generation descendant of the Quincy family whose name adorns the market complex. Here’s how the publisher describes it:
A bustling commercial center and favorite tourist attraction on Boston’s historic waterfront, Quincy Market, the popular name for Faneuil Hall Marketplace, draws throngs of visitors to the magnificent granite buildings and cobblestone concourses that house the area’s specialty shops, restaurants, boutiques, pushcarts, and food stalls. Yet few are aware of the history of this legendary public place and its importance in the history of Boston and the nation. In this elegantly written and lavishly illustrated work, John Quincy, Jr., tells the absorbing story of the Market’s unique evolution over the centuries. Beginning with John Winthrop’s landing at the Great Cove on the Shawmut Peninsula in 1630, Quincy weaves together a remarkable tapestry of the district’s rise, fall, and rebirth.
Upcoming Event
The Gibson House is a unique time capsule of Victorian Boston, as it was built in 1860, only very minimally updated since then, and left completely untouched since its last owner died in 1954. This undiscovered gem of a museum has been getting more attention in recent months, because it was used as a set in the recent Little Women movie.
The last owner of the house was Charles Gibson, Junior, who is the subject of the event. Charlie grew up in the Gibson house, and then moved back in after his father’s death in 1916. He cultivated a persona as the ultimate Boston Brahmin, a throwback to an earlier era. A later profile in the Boston Herald described him as “a Proper Bostonian whose Victorian elegance puts modern manners to shame,” and “a small man…with a nimble, if sometimes cantankerous physique…He strolls around with a sort of swagger stick with a silver tip out of deference to the fact that gold would be too vulgar.” He affected an English accent and was always quick to mention his ties to the elites of Boston, London, and Paris.
Charlie Gibson maintained his eccentric ways right up until the end. Into the 1950s, he kept up a habit of walking to the Ritz Carlton Hotel every night, where he would take his dinner in a full tuxedo and tails, top hat, and a raccoon coat in cold weather. Charlie, who was a lifelong bachelor and wrote an entire book of love poems that never mentioned a woman, has recently reemerged as a sort of gay icon for the LGBTQ history of early 20th century Boston.
Since their special “Charlie Gibson’s Queer Boston” themed tour had to be cut short when the pandemic began, the Gibson House will be offering a virtual version at 6pm on August 4th. Here’s how they describe it:
Explore the Gibson House and the gay subculture of early-twentieth-century Boston through Charlie Gibson’s eyes. The story of the Museum’s founder is one of legacy and family history, of the fading grandeur of Victorian-era Boston, and of Boston’s LGBTQ history.
The suggested donation for this event is $5 – $15, and advanced registration is required to get the Zoom connection details, additional reading materials, and a recipe for the evening’s themed cocktail.
Boston Goes to Bleeding Kansas (episode 195)
Jul 26, 2020
Bloody Kansas was a deadly guerrilla war between so-called Border Ruffians from Missouri in support of slavery on one side, and earnest abolitionists from New England on the other. The violence peaked on Kansas prairies in the decade before the US Civil War officially began, fought with guns, newspapers, artillery, and sometimes even broadswords. A Boston-based company that seeded those earnest abolitionists into that prairie and eventually looked the other way as they transformed themselves from farmers to vigilantes and soldiers.
Our header image shows members of the first party of emigrants, who left Boston on July 17, 1854 and founded Lawrence, Kansas on August 1.
Boston Book Club
Cloudsplitter is a 1999 a novel by Russell Banks. It’s a sprawling, 750 page epic of historical fiction, telling the story of John Brown and his family through the eyes of his son Owen. A 1998 review of the book said:
The picture that Owen draws of his father is that of a fierce, self-righteous prophet, a man who “did everything with greater intensity than the rest of us,” a patriarch who “took advice badly but gave it without stint,” an absolutist who divides the world into an “us” and a “them.”
The Old Man, we’re told, uses the Bible to justify everything from his domineering control of his family to his preaching the violent overthrow of slavery. He is a tireless proselytizer, a self-deluding dreamer, an Old Testament vigilante, and, it appears, a manic-depressive given to periods of dark brooding and interludes of equally frenetic activity. He willfully imposes his own obsession with slavery on his entire family, and he exhorts his sons to become coldblooded warriors willing to use any means to achieve their ends… Worse, Owen recounts, his father’s embrace of violence as a tool to wage war against slavery had tragic consequences for his children: some of his sons would become heartless killers, some would become martyrs to his cause.
Banks creates a portrait of the Brown family, full of complex resentments between sons and their father. His fictional approach means that he can describe the events at Pottawatomie or Harpers Ferry with a level of grisly, disturbing detail that isn’t available to historians. It’s not an easy book, but it is rewarding, though be aware that the author pretty flagrantly revises the historical facts to support his narrative.
Upcoming Event(s)
This Wednesday, July 29, a panel will discuss the impact of Covid-19 and past pandemics on indigeonous peoples in New England. Sponsored by Revolutionary Spaces and the Upstander Project, the panel will consist of the Chairwoman of the Native Land Conservancy, the Executive Director of the Tomaquag Museum, and the Learning Director at the Upstander Project. Two of the three panelists and the moderator are members of New England Native American tribes. Here’s how Revolutionary Spaces describes the event:
From smallpox and measles, to cholera, dysentery, and tuberculosis, Indigenous peoples have suffered disproportionate loss of life from disease since European settlers began to trade with them and later occupy their land. The novel coronavirus has impacted Indigenous peoples with a familiar ferocity, flagging their perennial lack of good jobs, housing, and healthcare. Join a distinguished panel of experts to learn about the historical and present-day conditions that have made Indigenous people especially vulnerable to disease, and the strategies required to break this pattern of discrimination and social violence.
This event is free, but advanced registration is required.
In almost every way, Boston was a city that relied on the maritime industry. The Old North Church was similarly shaped in many ways by its relationship to the sea. Using the church’s connection to the sea as a launching point, we will examine a narrative that goes beyond the walls of the building: how the sea affected the lives and fortunes of its congregants and even the look of the church itself. Specifically, we’ll dive in to the stories of Captain Samuel Nicholson and Captain Thomas Gruchy in addition to much more.
This event starts at 7pm on Tuesday, and tickets are $15.
The Prisoners of Peddocks Island (episode 194)
Jul 19, 2020
You may have heard stories about the Confederate prisoners who were held at Fort Warren on Georges Island during the civil war. In this episode, we’ll explore a different island that housed prisoners during a different war. Our story will start with the only soccer riot in recorded Boston history, which broke out at Carson Beach in South Boston on July 16, 1944. It will end up with Italian war prisoners confined at Fort Andrews on Peddocks Island in Boston Harbor. Along the way, we’ll meet bootleggers, artillerymen, Passamaquoddy seal hunters, opium fiends, and Portuguese-American fishermen. We’ll also be taking a virtual visit to one of my personal favorite places in the Boston area, and one that is on the brink of being sold off to luxury hotel developers.
Camp McKay via past podcast guest Earl Taylor
Camp McKay via the National Archives
Fort Andrews as it appeared during WWII
Live fire exercise in 1941, via the Washington DC Evening Star
The real pier at Peddocks Island, with a massive mountain digitally inserted behind it for Shutter Island.
Peddocks Island stands in for Shutter Island. Most of these officers’ quarters were demolished in 2011-2013.
Arriving on Peddocks Island
Welcome to Peddocks Island
Fort Andrews enlisted barracks
The base chapel where Italian Service Units worshipped
The gym and Post Exchange, where Matilda Silvia’s family shopped
Battery Frank Whitman
“Portuguese Cove” with the Boston Skyline behind
An abandoned cottage
Sunset behind Boston from Peddocks Island
Boston Book Club
East of Boston: Notes from the Harbor Islands, by Stephanie Schorow, is equal parts history book and travel guide, serving as a perfect introduction for the Boston Harbor Islands novice. From former Harbor Islands, like World’s End and Castle Island, to popular tourist draws like Georges and Spectacle Islands, to the windswept and little visited Brewsters and Graves, Schorow takes the reader through the entire archipelago of 34 Boston Harbor Islands.
In the early 20th century, Peddocks Island became an out-of-sight, out-of-mind home for unsavory activities and businesses like bordellos, speakeasies, and opium parties. There’s also a rich history of baseball being played on Peddocks Island. In East of Boston, Schorow explains that before the blue laws were finally changed in 1929, up to 5000 fans would flock to a long-lost ballpark on a narrow spit of land between two beaches on Peddocks to watch the Boston Braves play. Along with these more edgy topics, the publisher’s description says you will learn about “pirate treasure, elusive foxes, cross-dressing ghosts, flying Santas and a strange era of spontaneously combusting garbage dumps.”
While most of the islands will remain closed this summer, ferry service to Spectacle Island has started up and will run through October 12. If you are a frequent visitor to the Harbor Islands, or if you’re considering your first trip, it’s worth picking up East of Boston to help plan your trip, and so you know the many historic events that happened on each island.
Upcoming Event
On Thursday, July 23, check out Boston in Film: Beyond the Oscars, from the Massachusetts Historical Society, Emerson, and the Brattle Theater. A few weeks ago, we featured a talk focusing on movies that typecast the Hub as a home for mobsters, cops, and other tough-talking Irish characters. This week, Jim Vrabel, author of A People’s History of the New Boston, and Ned Hinckle of the Brattle Film Foundation will be presenting a more lighthearted counterpoint to that session. They will go beyond the grit to present a more well-rounded portrait of Boston. Here’s how the MHS website describes the event:
There are a remarkable number of gritty films set in Boston, yet that is not the only way the city is depicted. There are comedies, period pieces, and films that depict the diversity of the city with much greater accuracy. Next Stop Wonderland, Paper Chase and Between the Lines have not received the same attention from the Academy, but they have devout followings and depict a different vision of Boston. Our discussion will look at these other visions of the city and discuss short films and independent productions that offer a wider perspective of our city.
Prescott Townsend, From the First World War to the First Pride Parade, with Megan Linger (episode 193)
Jul 12, 2020
Prescott Townsend was one of the most interesting figures in Boston’s LGBTQ history. He was the ultimate Boston Brahmin, coming of age at Harvard in the shadow of Teddy Roosevelt and enlisting in the Navy during World War I. He served time in prison after getting caught in a Beacon Hill tryst back when homosexuality was a crime in Boston, and spent decades as an activist, helping to found the gay liberation movement, and marched at the head of the nation’s first pride parade on the first anniversary of Stonewall. We’re also going to meet a researcher who has uncovered new information about Prescott Townsend as part of an effort to improve how the National Park Service interprets the LGBTQ history of Boston.
Esther Forbes is well known as the author of Johnny Tremain, a beloved novel for young readers. This fictional version of the lead up to war in Boston from mid 1773 to just after the battles at Lexington and Concord in 1775 was published in 1943 and won the next year’s Newberry award. A decade later, Disney made it into a feature film. The year before Esther Forbes published Johnny Tremain, she published a biography of Paul Revere that remains one of the most respected titles on Revere and the historical context of his famous ride. When co-host emerita Nikki started work at Old North Church, she wanted to refresh her knowledge of the events of April 1775, and every historian we asked recommended Paul Revere and the World He Lived In, by Esther Forbes.
In a 1942 review, Revolutionary War historian Frederic Kirkland calls it “a picture of Revolutionary times which is unsurpassable.” It’s little wonder that the book won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1943, just as Johnny Tremain was being published.
Upcoming Event
Back at the beginning of June, I discussed the criminal career of burglar Levi Ames. However, the most interesting part of the story came after he was hanged in 1773, when medical students who would go on to be the top doctors in the newly independent United States tried desperately to steal his corpse, while a sympathetic minister tried desperately to hide it.
If you liked that tale of graverobbing resurrection men, you might enjoy an upcoming talk, titled “Anatomical Acts: Exploring the Intersections between Popular Anatomy and Popular Theatre in Nineteenth-Century America.” The event is being hosted by the Massachusetts Historical Society and led by Mia Levenson, a PhD candidate at Tufts. Her research examines 19th century grave robbing, public performance of science, and the growing popularity of blackface minstrel shows, showing how these seemingly disparate subjects are intertwined. Here’s how the MHS website describes it:
Levenson will contextualize her research as the intersection of three historical threads: the increasing importance of anatomical science to medical education, which contributed to widespread theft of bodies from public (and primarily African American) graves; the rise of a “popular anatomy,” whereby moral reformers sought to uplift the white middle-class through anatomical education; and the popularity of minstrelsy, a theatrical form that created a mockery of Black anatomy while, in some burlesques, simultaneously using the site of the dissection room as a punchline.
The talk will be held at 12pm on Thursday, July 16th. It’s free to the public, but you must register in advance to get the connection details.
A People’s Guide to Greater Boston, with Joseph Nevins and Suren Moodliar (episode 192)
Jul 05, 2020
A People’s Guide to Greater Boston is a new kind of guidebook to Boston and surrounding towns. Instead of giving an overview of the Freedom Trail and introducing readers to the hot restaurants and hotels of Boston, this guide uncovers the forgotten stories of radicals and activists hidden in every neighborhood and suburb. It has sections covering Boston’s urban core, the neighborhoods, adjoining towns, and suburbs from Brockton to Haverhill. In each section, the authors unearth a wide range of sites, and in some cases former sites, that are tied to Black, indigenous, labor, or other radical historic events and figures. For listeners who complain that our normal episodes are too political, or our point of view is too liberal… well, sorry in advance. This guide definitely doesn’t keep politics out of history, and its point of view is well to the left of our usual editorial voice.
The book has a companion website and Facebook page, where the authors will continue to expand this history of radical Boston.
From the publisher:
A People’s Guide to Greater Boston reveals the region’s richness and vibrancy in ways that are neglected by traditional area guidebooks and obscured by many tourist destinations. Affirming the hopes, interests, and struggles of individuals and groups on the receiving end of unjust forms of power, the book showcases the ground-level forces shaping the city. Uncovering stories and places central to people’s lives over centuries, this guide takes readers to sites of oppression, resistance, organizing, and transformation in Boston and outlying neighborhoods and municipalities—from Lawrence, Lowell, and Lynn to Concord and Plymouth. It highlights tales of the places and people involved in movements to abolish slavery; to end war and militarism; to achieve Native sovereignty, racial equity, gender justice, and sexual liberation; and to secure workers’ rights. In so doing, this one-of-a-kind guide points the way to a radically democratic Greater Boston, one that sparks social and environmental justice and inclusivity for all.
Eleni Macrakis grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and now works in the field of affordable housing development in the Greater Boston area. She holds a Master in Urban Planning from Harvard University. (Eleni did not participate in this interview.)
Upcoming Event
Thursday, July 9 at 6pm, Dr. Richard Bell of the University of Maryland will be giving a talk hosted by the Boston Athenaeum. Landing just on time for the Hamilton movie’s streaming debut, this week’s virtual event is titled “Hamilton: How the Musical Remixes American History.” Here’s how the Athenaeum describes it:
Even in lockdown, America has Hamilton-mania! With Disney+ streaming the show this July, everyone’s talking about Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Tony-winning musical. Its crafty lyrics, hip-hop tunes, and big, bold story have even rejuvenated interest in the real lives and true histories that Hamilton: the Musical puts center stage. In this talk, University of Maryland historian Dr. Richard Bell will explore this musical phenomenon to reveal what its success tells us about the marriage of history and show-business. We’ll learn what this amazing musical gets right and gets wrong about Alexander Hamilton, the American Revolution, and the birth of the United Sates and about why all that matters. We will examine some of the choices Hamilton’s creators made to simplify, dramatize, and humanize the complicated events and stories on which the show is based. We will also talk about Hamilton’s cultural impact: what does its runaway success reveal about the stories we tell each other about who we are and about the nation we made?
Pamphlets, Statues, and the Selling of Joseph (episode 191)
Jun 28, 2020
In June 1700, a brief pamphlet titled The Selling of Joseph was published in Boston. It’s considered the first abolitionist tract to be published in what’s now the United States. Authored by Salem witch trial judge Samuel Sewall, the three page pamphlet uses biblical references to argue that enslaving another person could never be considered moral. Listen to find out what motivated Sewall to write the tract, how his peers in Boston reacted to it, and what its effect was on the wider world. In light of recent events, we’ll also consider the current debate around statues and their removal.
The fight against Birth of a Nation is also the topic of Birth of a Movement, which first aired on PBS in 2017. DW Griffith’s movie Birth of a Nation, which was based on an earlier book and play by Thomas Dixon called “The Clansman,” was widely praised for innovative new filmmaking techniques like close up shots of an actor’s face and fadeouts where a shot slowly dissolved into darkness. It had a revolutionary score, blending original musical compositions with works from the classical canon like Ride of the Valkyries and traditional heartland music like Dixie. It was anchored by thrilling action scenes shot on a never-before-seen scale, with thousands of actors and extras, hundreds of horses, and battlefield effects like real cannons. It quickly became the biggest blockbuster the movie business had ever seen, and it was the most popular movie in Boston when it was released here.
Birth of a Nation is also essentially a love note to the KKK. Set in the South during the Civil War and Reconstruction, it reenacted battle scenes from the war, portrayed the Confederate cause as morally superior to the Union, and showed Union soldiers indiscriminately burning and destroying civilian property in the South. In the postwar scenes, it portrayed newly emancipated African Americans as the embodiment of every stereotype and secret white fear. They were depicted as slothful, bent on revenge against their former owners, and lust crazed for white women. Scenes of rape, forced marriage, and lynching are portrayed in loving, almost pornographic detail. Against this chaotic background, the Ku Klux Klan is portrayed as the heroic saviors of white southern womanhood, and the uniters of White Americans, north and south, in shared violence against African Americans.
The Birth of a Movement is a modern response to Birth of a Nation, and an examination of the protest movement against it. The documentary is narrated by Danny Glover, and the description on the PBS website says “Birth of a Movement features interviews with Spike Lee (whose NYU student film The Answer was a response to Griffith’s film), Reginald Hudlin, DJ Spooky, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Dick Lehr, while exploring how Griffith’s film — long taught in film classes as an innovative work of genius — motivated generations of African American filmmakers and artists as they worked to reclaim their history and their onscreen image.”
Upcoming Event(s)
Have you ever noticed how many movies set in Boston have a certain feel to them? I love the fact that filmmakers have fallen in love with this city, but if Boston was an actor, it would complain about being typecast. Just seeing the skyline, the State House dome, or the Zakim bridge in a movie trailer pretty much guarantees that the reviews are going to include the phrase “a grim and gritty drama about…” Without seeing any more, you can guess that the plot is going to be about cops, mobsters, or working class whites struggling to keep their heads above water.
Sponsored by the Brattle Theater, Emerson College, and the Massachusetts Historical Society, a talk titled “Boston in Film, from Eddie Coyle to Manchester by the Sea,” will examine some of those tropes, and the roots of Boston’s cinematic stereotyping. Here’s how the MHS website describes it:
The 1973 film The Friends of Eddie Coyle was not a box office smash but it became a cult classic and was particularly popular among film makers and film critics. The movie may have been the first to depict Boston as a working class and violent city but it certainly was not the last. With Academy award-winng films including The Departed, Mystic River, Goodwill Hunting, and Manchester by the Sea, one might say there is a gritty Boston genre. Our discussion will explore what these films say about Boston and what the city represents nationally.
The event will be a panel discussion headed by Professor Robert Allison of Suffolk University and Boston Globe film critic Ty Burr. It’s an online event at 5:30pm on July 9, so be sure to register in advance to get the connection details.
Bonus event: The Executive Director and Adult Program Director of the Paul Revere House will be leading a virtual public forum hosted by the Concord Museum this Wednesday, July 1 at 7pm. The subject of the talk is separating fact from fiction in the stories surrounding Paul Revere and his famous ride.
Here’s how the Concord Museum describes it:
Paul Revere and his midnight ride—immortalized as the harbinger of the dramatic escalation of the American colonial rebellion against the British Empire—has been celebrated in tales and songs throughout the centuries. But what really happened on April 18, 1775? Experts shed light on the legendary ride and the man behind it, revealing the fascinating life of a fabled national hero who witnessed the birth of a nation.
Like a Trump of Coming Judgement (episode 190)
Jun 21, 2020
This week, we’re revisiting a classic episode about the radical Black abolitionist David Walker. Walker was a transplant to Boston, moving here after possibly being involved in Denmark Vesey’s planned 1822 slave insurrection in South Carolina. At a time when very few whites spoke of ending slavery, Frederick Douglass said Walker’s book An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World “startled the land like a trump of coming judgement.” He demanded an immediate end to slavery, and he endorsed violence against white slave owners to bring about abolition. After the book helped inspire Nat Turner’s 1830 uprising in Virginia, southern slave states banned his book and offered a reward for anyone who would kill or kidnap him. With a price on his head, many people believed that David Walker’s mysterious death in a Beacon Hill doorway just a year after his landmark book was published was an assassination.
The full text of David Walker’s Appeal in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America
The first edition of William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator. His notes on the Appeal are on page 3.
1832 map of Boston. Look for Belknap and Bridge Streets (where Walker resided) in the top center. Belknap is on the border between pink and yellow, and Bridge is near the border between blue and pink.
Header image (of WEB DuBois’ first edition of the Appeal) by Leon Jackson
We’ve used Richard Vacca’s blog about jazz and jazz clubs in Boston for background on past episodes, especially our shows about the Cocoanut Grove fire and the murder of mobster Charles “Boston Charlie” Solomon. Published in 2012, Vacca’s The Boston Jazz Chronicles: Faces, Places, and Nightlife 1937–1962 captures a moment in time when jazz emerged from the world of “race music” and found widespread appeal with white audiences. It introduces the reader to the composers, musicians, and nightclubs that provided the soundtrack for Boston’s wartime boom and postwar bust. The publisher says,
The Boston Jazz Chronicles is the first book to document the the birth and growth of the Boston jazz scene at mid-century. It describes the formative big-band and wartime years, and follows the scene’s dramatic postwar growth, when Boston became a destination for young veterans and big band musicians seeking new direction… The Boston Jazz Chronicles is also a story of places now lost to time. The jazz haunts are gone, replaced by offices, apartments, and parking lots. But through these years there was music, at the Savoy Café, the Ken Club, the Hi-Hat, the Stable, and other rooms both rowdy and refined.
Though the book rarely talks explicitly about race, it is by default a book about the intersection of black and white worlds in an era when Boston, like much of the north, was still strongly segregated. It’s illustrated with period photos, advertisements, and maps, and it even includes a discography for readers who want to immerse themselves in Boston’s mid-century jazz sound.
Upcoming Event(s)
First up is a virtual tour of the Jackson Homestead at 2pm on June 26, with past podcast guest Clara Silverstein. The Jackson Homestead is a Federal style home owned by Historic Newton, and the event is a collaboration between Historic Newton and the Massachusetts Historical Society. Originally built in 1809 on a farm the Jackson family had owned since 1646, the house remained in the family until 1949, leaving it well preserved when the city started operating it as a museum. When it’s open to actually visit in person, Historic Newton advertises the Jackson Homestead and Museum as “a participatory museum with exhibits for children and adults, featuring exhibitions about the history of food, farming, and family life; slavery and anti-slavery; and notable people and events in Newton.” For this special virtual event, the MHS says “This tour will focus specifically on the complex legacy of slavery and abolitionism at the homestead, including it’s history as a stop on the Underground Railroad.”
Join The History Project and Ranger Meaghan Michel of the Longfellow House – Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site and Ranger Megan Linger of the National Parks of Boston for a presentation on queer history interpretation and inclusion in the National Park Service.
RSVP on Eventbrite, and a link to the Zoom will be sent out the day of the event. Email info@historyproject.org with any questions. For security purposes, Zoom meetings require an authenticated Zoom account, so please be sure to register with Zoom prior to the event.
The Gamblers’ Riot (episode 189)
Jun 14, 2020
For almost 400 years now, Boston has never needed much prompting to start a riot. There have been anti-Catholic riots, anti-immigrant riots, anti-Catholic immigrant riots, anti-draft riots, pro-draft riots, anti-slavery riots, pro-slavery riots, bread riots, busing riots, and police riots. In the 20th century, sports began to be a driving factor behind riots in Boston. Long before Victoria Snelgrove was killed by a police pepperball after the 2004 World Series, before the fires and overturned cars after the 2001 Super Bowl, there was the Gamblers’ Riot. 103 years ago this week, gamblers at Fenway Park got mad at the umpires, at Babe Ruth, and at the Chicago White Sox and stormed the field.
“Call the Game! The 1917 Fenway Park Gamblers Riot,” a reprint of his article in Base Ball: A Journal of the Early Game (McFarland & Co., Vol. 6, No. 1, Spring 2012). This episode wouldn’t have been possible without Pomrenke’s terrific research.
The only known photo of the riot
From the Boston Globe, June 17, 1917
Boston Book Club
Baseball fans remember Ted Williams as “the splendid splinter,” one of the greatest hitters of all time. He had a reputation as a surly and standoffish star when dealing with the press and masses of fans, while simultaneously working behind the scenes tirelessly to support children with cancer and almost single-handedly launching the Jimmy Fund.
Like many of his peers in Major League Baseball, Williams was drafted into the military. Unlike most of those peers, he chose not to spend the war years playing exhibition baseball for the Navy service team. Instead, he went to flight school for the US Marine Corps, and ended up as a flight instructor in Pensacola, Florida, and was on his way to fight in the Western Pacific when the war ended. Seven years later, he was called up from the Marine Reserves to fight in the Korean war, where he flew 39 combat missions and was shot down once.
In 1943, while the New York Yankees and St. Louis Cardinals were winning pennants and meeting in that year’s World Series, Ted Williams, Johnny Pesky, and Johnny Said practiced on a skinned-out college field in the heart of North Carolina. They and other past and future stars formed one of the greatest baseball teams of all time. They were among a cadre of fighter-pilot cadets who wore the Cloudbuster Nine baseball jersey at an elite Navy training school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
As a child, [author] Anne Keene’s father, Jim Raugh, suited up as the team batboy and mascot. He got to know his baseball heroes personally, watching players hit the road on cramped, tin-can buses, dazzling factory workers, kids, and service members at dozens of games, including a war-bond exhibition with Babe Ruth at Yankee Stadium. Jimmy followed his baseball dreams as a college All-American but was crushed later in life by a failed major-league bid with the Detroit Tigers. He would have carried this story to his grave had Anne not discovered his scrapbook from a Navy school that shaped America’s greatest heroes including George H. W. Bush, Gerald Ford, John Glenn, and Paul “Bear” Bryant.
With the help of rare images and insights from World War II baseball veterans such as Dr. Bobby Brown and Eddie Robinson, the story of this remarkable team is brought to life for the first time in The Cloudbuster Nine: The Untold Story of Ted Williams and the Baseball Team That Helped Win World War II.
Upcoming Event
Cornell professor Mary Beth Norton is a historian of the Colonial era and a past president of the American Historical Association. She has written extensively on the roles women played in colonial America, and her latest book is 1774: Year of Revolutions. She’ll be giving an online author talk for the Massachusetts Historical Society at 5:30pm on Wednesday, June 24. Here’s how the MHS describes her talk:
Mary Beth Norton will give us a preview of her new book, a narrative history of the “long year” of 1774, or the months from December 1773 to April 1775, which have tended to be overlooked by historians who focus instead on the war for independence. But John Adams, who lived through that era, declared that the true revolution took place in the minds of the people before a shot was fired at Lexington. The year 1774, Norton argues, was when that revolution occurred.
The online event is free, but you must register in advance to get the Zoom connection details.
Dissection Denied (episode 188)
Jun 07, 2020
Levi Ames was a notorious thief who plagued the Boston area in the years just before the Revolutionary War began. He stole everything from shirts to silver plate, crisscrossing New England, until he finally got caught right here in Boston. Tune in to learn about his criminal background, his supposed jailhouse religious conversion, and the desperate race between some of the most prominent Bostonians to steal his body after his execution.
Our pick for the Boston Book Club this week is Chain of Change: Struggles for Black Community Development, by Mel King. Published in 1981, hard on the heels of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement and as Boston was just barely coming out the other side of the busing crisis, Chain of Change looks both backwards and forwards. It’s a comprehensive record of Black Boston’s struggles in the decade roughly bracketed between 1958 and 1968, it’s a call to action for the 1980s, and it’s a personal history of Mel King himself. Now 93 years old, Mel King was the child of immigrants from the West Indies. He grew up in Boston reading William Monroe Trotter’s Boston Guardian and attending the Church of All Nations. In a long career as an activist, he worked on streetcorners trying to keep kids from joining gangs, as a community organizer, teacher, and finally as a state representative for the South End and Lower Roxbury.
We’ve used the book as a source several times in the past, especially for episode 77, about the Tent City protests that he organized, and for episode 140, about the police riot in Grove Hall in 1967. Mel’s wife Joyce is also a formidable activist and organizer in her own right. They have been married for almost 70 years now.
Upcoming Event
William Bradford signed the Mayflower compact, helped found Plymouth colony, and served as its governor for much of its first three decades. During those decades, he wrote a journal known as Of Plimoth Plantation that covers the history of the Pilgrim Separatists as they fled England for the Netherlands in 1608, then emigrated to the shores of New England in 1620.
In honor of the 400th anniversary of the Pilgrim settlement in Massachusetts, Dr. Francis J Bremer of New England Beginnings created a new edition of the journal, published by the New England Historical Genealogical Society and the Colonial Society of Massachusetts. This Thursday, June 11 at 2pm, he and fellow editor Ken Minkema of Yale Divinity School will host an online seminar about Bradford, Plymouth, and what it took to create this landmark work. If you want to join the free online event, just make sure to register in advance to get the zoom meeting details.
Marathon Man, with Bill Rodgers (episode 187)
May 31, 2020
HUB History loves the Boston Marathon almost as much as we love Boston history. Patriots Day is one of Nikki’s favorite days of the year, and Jake has run Boston for charity. Just days before the BAA announced that the 124th Boston Marathon would have to be held as a virtual event, we had an opportunity to chat with a Boston Marathon legend. Bill “Boston Billy” Rodgers is a four-time winner of the Boston marathon, so we were excited to talk to him about marathon history, the runners he looks up to, and his own historic runs.
Bill Rodgers is a four-time winner of both the Boston and the New York City marathons. He was named the #1 marathoner in the world 3 times by Track and Field News and is an inductee of the National Distance Running Hall of Fame. Bill is an Olympian, and a bronze medal winner for the United States in the 1975 World Cross-Country Championships. He is also the author of Marathon Man, which details his journey to the top of the running world.
Visit Bill’s online Bill Rodgers Running Center, where you can order a signed copy of his book, see his upcoming public appearances, and read the astounding training log from his 1974 marathon training season.
Who are these runners you keep mentioning?
Amby Burfoot: Bill’s roommate at Wesleyan won the 1968 Boston Marathon and served as editor-in-chief at Runner’s World, where he still writes.
Jeff Galloway: Another of Bill’s Wesleyan teammates, Galloway represented the US at the 1972 Olympics in the 10,000 meter. He is known for developing a run/walk method that makes running accessible for millions.
Johnny Kelley, the elder: John A Kelley holds the record for the most Boston Marathons, having run 61 and finished 58. He won in 1935 and 1945.
Johnny Kelley, the younger: John J Kelley won Boston in 1957 and ran the race 32 times. He was also Amby Burfoot’s high school track coach.
Ellison “Tarzan” Brown: Tarzan Brown won Boston in 1936 and 1939, setting a course record. He was a member of the Narragansett Tribe of Rhode Island, and he was a force in New England distance running for over a decade, representing the US at the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany. Heartbreak Hill was named after Johnny Kelley, the elder, caught up to Brown on the way up the hill in 1936. Kelley patted Brown on the back in a conciliatory gesture, which inspired Brown’s second wind. He passed Kelley and went on to win, supposedly breaking Kelley’s heart in the process.
Meb Keflezighi: Meb was an influential runner from the early 2000s through at least 2016. He represented the US at the Olympics in 2004, 2012, and 2016, earning a silver medal for the 2004 marathon. After the 2013 bombings, he endeared himself to Bostonians by winning the Boston Marathon, becoming the first American to win the men’s race in 31 years. He later revealed that he had the names of the bombing victims written on his race bib. He has retired from competition, but he’s now a very fast masters runner at 45 years old.
Frank Shorter: One of Bill’s contemporaries, Frank Shorter was one of the great marathoners of the 1970s. He won the Olympic gold at the marathon in 1972 and took silver in 1976. Bill Rodgers credits him with igniting the American running boom.
Steve “Pre” Prefontaine: Pre was the wunderkind of middle distance running from the late 1960s until his untimely death in 1975 at just 24 years old. He was an aggressive runner with a rockstar attitude, representing the US at the 1972 Olympic games. He was the first athlete to be sponsored by Nike, and like Bill, he fought the AAU’s policies on amateurism and tried to allow runners to get paid to compete.
Clarence DeMar: Bill Rodgers calls seven-time Boston champion Clarence DeMar “the greatest marathoner of them all” and “the king of the Boston Marathon.” Read this profile for more about DeMar, from his youth at the state boys’ school on Thompson Island on Boston Harbor, to the doctors who told him his heart was too weak to run, to his dominant 20 year running career. Check out this collection of photos of DeMar, as well.
If you’ve never watched Joan Benoit (later Samuelson) win the inaugural women’s Olympic marathon in 1984, watch it now. I can’t see her emerge from the tunnel into the stadium and hear the crowd go wild without getting choked up every time. (You can also check out a longer version from the telecast, complete with commentary by Bill Rodgers and Katherine Switzer, plus vintage 1984 TV commercials: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 5)
This collection of 1940s marathon shoes is taken from this excellent Boston Public Library gallery of marathon photos.
If you were surprised by Bill’s sympathetic view of Jock Semple, who attempted to take Katherine Switzer’s race bib in 1967, read this article compiled by Bill’s old roommate Amby Burfoot that describes him of a product of his time.
You can learn more about Katherine Switzer, Bobbi Gibb, and the fight to open the Boston Marathon to women in our Episode 127.
While everyone knows of the challenge that Anne Hutchinson posed to the New England puritan establishment, the roles of ordinary women in Congregationalism has been neglected. This talk will focus on how women helped to shape puritan ideas, form puritan churches, teach fellow believers, and vote on various ecclesiastical issues.
Originally scheduled to happen at the Central Library, this Baxter Lecture will now be a virtual event. The event is free, but advanced registration is required in order to get the Zoom connection info.
A Forgotten Battle on Boston Harbor (episode 186)
May 24, 2020
245 years ago this week, provincial militia and royal marines battled it out in what is now East Boston. The battle of Chelsea Creek was sandwiched between the battle of Lexington in April and Bunker Hill in June, and it’s often overshadowed by the larger battles in our memories. While the casualties and stakes were lower than those familiar battles, this skirmish over livestock was an important testing ground for the new American army. It proved that the militias of different colonies could plan and fight together, it confirmed the wisdom of maneuvering and firing from cover instead of facing the redcoats head-on, and it bolstered provincial morale with a decisive victory. The ragtag American army even managed to destroy a ship of the Royal Navy in the fighting!
Our header image this week is one in a series of panoramic views from the top of Beacon Hill that were painted by a British officer during the siege of Boston. Noddle Island is at 4, Hog Island is at 5, and the Winnisimmet ferry is at 3.
A georeferenced 1776 map of Boston Harbor showing how the islands and Chelsea all fit together. Zoom in and out, then use the slider to adjust the opacity of the historic map to see the modern map below.
We relied heavily on the account of the battle compiled in this 2011 report and a related 2009 article.
The Green Dragon Tavern was home to the St Andrews Freemason lodge, the Loyal Nine, the Sons of Liberty, and the Boston Committee of Correspondence. It was where the Tea Party was planned and where Paul Revere got his instructions to ride to Lexington and Concord. This unique candle smells like coffee, pipe tobacco, and revolution. It was poured as a small, limited edition run in an exclusive Green Dragon Tavern mug that’s perfect for coffee or ale.
You might also consider the 1775 militia collection, honoring the citizen soldiers who turned out for the battles of Lexington and Concord, Bunker Hill, and even Chelsea Creek, months before the Continental Army was formed.
Save 20% on any purchase with the discount code HUBHISTORY.
Boston Book Club
Universal Hub is my first stop for all Boston-related news, and they recently ran a history article titled “The Elevated Origins of a Lowly Building in Chinatown.” At the corner of Harrison and Beach Street, within sight of the Chinatown gate, there’s a nondescript, single story building with storefronts for a Vietnamese sandwich shop and a bakery. As writer Adam Gaffin points out, it’s normal in every way, except that it’s the only single story building in a dense, built up neighborhood. In uncovering the reason behind the building’s surprising compactness, Gaffin tells the story of three decades of transit development in Boston. He says:
When the building went up, it could not reach higher because elevated train tracks ran right above it, carrying trains on a sharp curve from Harrison Avenue onto Beach Street as part of a waterfront loop that was, for three decades, possibly as close as we’ll ever get to a North/South rail link.
In order to allow for the turn at Harrison and Beach, the railway company had to use its state-granted power to condemn property at the corner, in particular, the multi-story Boston Hotel, which had stood there since at least the 1860s.
The article follows the Atlantic Ave El from the planning stage in 1897, through construction, to its surge and then decline in ridership as the Tremont Street subway tunnel carried more passengers. Finally, it describes how the entire line was shut down in 1938 and scrapped in 1942 to support the war effort. It’s an excellent piece about a neighborhood’s changing needs for transit, and how transit in turn changed the neighborhood.
Here’s how the Massachusetts Historical Society describes the event:
Picturing Political Power offers a comprehensive analysis of the connection between images, gender, and power. This examination of the fights that led to the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment explores how suffragists pioneered one of the first extensive visual campaigns in modern American history. Prof. Allison Lange shows how pictures, from early engravings and photographs to colorful posters, proved central to suffragists’ efforts to change expectations for women, fighting back against the accepted norms of their times. Picturing Political Power demonstrates the centrality of visual politics to American women’s campaigns throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, revealing the power of images to change history.
The talk will begin at 5:30pm on Wednesday, June 3. It’s a free event, but you’ll have to register in order to get the zoom connection info.
Whale Watching on Washington Street (episode 185)
May 17, 2020
In the 1860s, Bostonians could pay 20 cents and watch a captive whale swim in a custom built aquarium on Washington Street in Boston’s Downtown Crossing. Today, there’s no sea world near Boston, and our New England Aquarium doesn’t hold any whales or dolphins. Perhaps that’s for the best, as we now realize how intelligent these giants of the sea are. However, things were different 160 years ago, when an entrepreneurial inventor did the impossible, bringing a beluga whale alive from the arctic ocean to Boston and keeping it alive here for at least 18 months, before being betrayed by the greatest showman, PT Barnum himself.
Please check out the transcript and full show notes OR register for our Boston History Happy Hour at: http://HUBhistory.com/185/
From Ballou’s
Sally Gooll Putnam draws the harnessed whale
Sally Gooll Putnam draws the whale tank
Ned the seal plays the hand organ
Ned the seal doing musket drills
From Butler’s book
Compare the Aquarial Gardens in the 1860s to this exhibit of a dead whale that toured the midwest in the 1880s.
Boston Book Club
Damrell’s Fire is a documentary available on Amazon Prime Video, along with a companion site for educators. It charts John Damrell’s rise from a volunteer firefighter in Boston to the chief of the city’s newly professional fire department. It opens with the horror of Chicago’s October 1871 Great Fire, and the lessons in fire prevention Damrell learned by observing the aftermath. It also covers the political battles that prevented Damrell from implementing many of his ideas.
About a year after the Chicago fire, Damrell was forced to confront Boston’s own great fire. On November 9, 1872, a small fire erupted in a basement in the heart of Boston’s downtown commercial district. Because of flawed construction techniques that allowed fires to accelerate quickly, that small fire soon became a towering inferno of flame that was seemingly unstoppable as it swept across the city’s center. While fighting the fire, Damrell also had to fight business and political leaders about whether to use gunpowder to demolish buildings in the path of the fire and which businesses to save. The Boston Fire Department was able to stop the fire, but Damrell got fired anyway. Not, however, before he could put steps into place that would help prevent similar firestorms in other cities.
The 55 minute film features documentary mainstays like historical maps, photos, engravings, and clips from early silent films. There are interviews with fire department officials, and familiar names in Boston history, like anthony sammarco, stephanie schorow, and professor robert allison. One of my favorite elements was a series of animations recreating 1872 Boston and showing how the fire progressed. Imagine the graphic quality of a 15 year old, low budget video game, but they still seem to be an accurate 3d rendering of the city as it existed then. My favorite was a photo showing Old South Meeting House and Washington Street that seamlessly transitioned into an animation.
Upcoming Event
Gavin Kleespies, Director of Programs, Exhibitions and Community Partnerships at the Mass Historical Society, will be giving a talk called “Misled: a virtual tour of inaccurate historical markers” this Wedneseday, May 20 at 5:30pm.
The event listing features a stone marker near Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge that says “On this spot in the year 1000 Leif Erikson built his house in Vineland.” Longtime listeners may remember that way back in episode 17, we covered the common belief in late 19th century Boston that Vikings had settled the Charles River valley. In reality, of course, a wealthy baking powder magnate simply read a bunch of books about vikings, walked to the banks of the charles nearest his house, kicked at a pile of stones, and said Eureka! Leif Erikson’s house!
Sometimes, that’s all it takes to set the historical record wrong, as the description of the event explains:
Historical markers influence what and who we remember, but sometimes they aren’t quite what they appear. Some are just wrong. Even in a city like Cambridge, Massachusetts, a place known world-wide as a home to rigorous scholarship, misleading and inaccurate historical markers can be found. While these markers don’t always reflect the whole truth, sometimes the stories they tell offer important lessons about who gets to shape history. This virtual tour will explore Cambridge’s strange patchwork of unreliable markers including “mimic” houses, mislabeled trees and even a fake rock.
Henry Knox’s Noble Train, with William Hazelgrove (episode 184)
May 10, 2020
Henry Knox commanded the Continental Army’s artillery, founded the academy that became West Point, and went on to become the first Secretary of War for the new United States. Before any of that, though, he was a young man in Boston. He was a Whig sympathizer who was in love with the daughter of a Tory, and he owned a bookstore frequented by both sides. Young Henry Knox was catapulted to prominence after one nearly unbelievable feat: bringing 60 tons of heavy artillery 300 miles through the New England wilderness in the dead of winter, from Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York to Cambridge. William Hazelgrove joins us on the show this week to describe how Knox accomplished this nearly impossible task. He’ll also tell us about his new book Henry Knox’s Noble Train: The Story of a Boston Bookseller’s Heroic Expedition That Saved the American Revolution, which comes out this week.
Please check out the transcript and full show notes OR register for our Boston History Happy Hour at: http://HUBhistory.com/184/
A map of Lake George, from Fort Ticonderoga in the north to Fort William Henry in the south. Fort George was built about half a mile to the east of the ruins of William Henry
Co-host Nikki and I are hosting a virtual Boston history happy hour and trivia night. All the event calendars we usually check are basically blank at this point, so we decided to throw our own. Nikki is writing up some trivia questions, so we can have virtual bar trivia at our virtual bar night. On Friday, May 15, we’re bringing the nerdiest bar in town to you at 5:30pm So warm up your webcam, and crack open a cold one, and come hang out with us!
Just submit your email address below, and we’ll send out a link to our Zoom meeting.
Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter, with Kerri Greenidge (episode 183)
May 03, 2020
From his Harvard graduation in 1895 to his death in 1934, William Monroe Trotter was one of the most influential and uncompromising advocates for the rights of Black Americans. He was a leader who had the vision to co-found groups like the Niagara Movement and the NAACP, but he also had an ego that prevented him from working effectively within the movements he started. He was a critic of Booker T Washington, and an early ally of Marcus Garvey. Monroe Trotter was the publisher of the influential Black newspaper the Boston Guardian, and he is the subject of a new biography by Tufts Professor Kerri Greenidge called Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter.
Please check out the transcript and full show notes OR register for our Boston History Happy Hour at: http://HUBhistory.com/183/
Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter
Dr. Kerri K. Greenidge is an associate professor in the Department of Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora at Tufts University. She also serves as codirector of the African American Trail Project. In the past, Kerri taught at Boston University, UMass, and Emerson. She also served as historian for the Boston African American National Historical Site for nine years before moving to Tufts. Make sure to buy the book and follow her on Twitter.
For obvious reasons (stupid covid crisis!), most of her book events have been cancelled, but you can hear her speak at the Edith Wharton House in Lenox, MA on August 10 and August 11.
There are also some related podcasts we think you might enjoy:
Join us for a Boston History Happy hour on Friday, May 15 at 5:30pm. If we can’t go to the bar, we’ll bring the bar to you, with Boston history bar trivia. Fire up your webcam, pour your favorite beverage, and join a fun socially distanced party. Register in the show notes, and we’ll send you a Zoom link. Don’t worry, we won’t spam you. We aren’t nearly organized enough for that!
Unequal Justice in Boston (episode 182)
Apr 26, 2020
This week we’re revisiting two classic episodes to highlight injustice in how the death penalty has been applied in our city’s history. First, we’re going to visit early Boston, in a time when execution by hanging was a shockingly common sentence for everything from murder and piracy to witchcraft and Quakerdom. During this period, hanging was the usual, and execution by fire was decidedly unusual. This punishment was reserved only for members of one race and one sex, and in Boston’s history, only two enslaved African American women were burned at the stake. After that, we’ll fast forward to the mid-19th century, when it seemed like the death penalty would soon be abolished. After 13 years without an execution in Boston, a black sailor was convicted of first degree murder. Despite the fact that white men convicted in similar circumstances were sentenced to life in prison, he was condemned to death. And despite tens of thousands of signatures on petitions for clemency, he was hanged at Leverett Street Jail in May of 1849.
(yes, at one point we say “1777” when we mean 1775, “architecture” when we mean architect, and we pronounce “gaol” as “gall” instead of “jail.” This episode was already exhausting enough, and we didn’t go back to fix those flubs.)
The Case of Maria, in the Court of Assistants in 1681, a paper presented at the Massachusetts Colonial Society in 1900. (Note: in original sources, the name of Mariah is spelled many ways, including Maria, Marja, and Mariah. We consider Mariah the most likely)
An article about the Concord petition in the journal Concord Saunterer.
Data on capital punishment in the US that we used to calculate the decrease in executions from 1801 to 1845, then the rise again after 1845.
Boston Book Club
Kevin Lynch studied architecture with Frank Lloyd Wright, trained at Yale, Rensselaer, and MIT, and served with the US Army Corps of Engineers, then spent 30 years as a professor of urban planning at MIT. During this long career, he how people perceive the cities that surround them and became a proponent of mental mapping. His 1960 book The Image of the City is his most famous work, resulting from a five year study of how people form mental maps of urban environments. He concluded that most people imagine their cities in predictable ways, and their mental maps are composed of elements Lynch called paths, nodes, districts, landmarks, and edges.
Of course, to study people’s mental maps of Boston, Lynch had to transform them into physical maps. He usually did this by having his participants sketch out their mental maps, and sometimes by sketching out what they described to him verbally. He would then compare the resulting maps or combine many of them into a consensus view of a city or district. To me, these resulting maps are the most delightful part of this book. The book was written in an era before widespread computer graphics, and Lynch had trained as an architect, so the book is packed with neat, hand drawn maps that are marked up with handy notation and clear explanations in Lynch’s perfect architect’s handwriting.
Whether these sketches were showing how the docks and warehouses of Boston’s waterfront, then a much more active commercial port, prevented most Bostonians from experiencing the harbor, or showing how people first envision open spaces and prominent landmarks when describing their cities, these maps are gems. Even if you don’t pick up the book, the MIT library holds a collection of his drawings that are viewable online.
Upcoming Event
And for our upcoming event this week, we’re featuring a virtual book talk from the Massachusetts Historical Society. Abram Van Engen of Washington University in St Louis will be discussing his book City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism. Here’s how the MHS describes the event:
Abram Van Engen shows how the phrase “City on a hill,” from a 1630 sermon by Massachusetts Bay governor John Winthrop, shaped the story of American exceptionalism in the 20th century. By tracing the strange history of Winthrop’s speech, from total obscurity in its own day to pervasive use in modern politics, Van Engen reveals the way national stories take shape and shows us how those tales continue to influence competing visions of the country—the many different meanings of America that emerge from a preservation of its literary past.
The event is free, but to avoid zoom-bombing, you’ll have to register in advance to get a link to the virtual meeting.
The Bloody Flux of 1775, with Judy Cataldo (episode 181)
Apr 19, 2020
In the late summer of 1775, a terrible epidemic struck Boston, and much of New England. As the Revolutionary War heated up, and the siege of Boston reached its peak, both armies faced an invisible enemy. Judy Cataldo will join us on the show this week to explain the disease that was known at the time as the bloody flux. Today, we might know it better by the name dysentery or shigella. The bloody flux was a diarrheal disease that took a terrible toll on the region’s children, but now it’s barely remembered, as it’s overshadowed by a smallpox outbreak of the same year.
Judy Cataldo is an independent scholar and a volunteer with several local organizations, including Minuteman National Park, since 1974. Judy has either attended or presented at every History Camp Boston but one, and she was scheduled to present this year in March, until our current circumstances forced a delay. She’s also a historical spinner and a reenactor with the Westford Colonial Minutemen.
Put yourself in the shoes of Abigail Adams as she negotiates the grief and fear of the 1775 Bloody flux:
August 10/11 “The joy is overclouded, and the Day is darkened by the mixture of Grief and the Sympathy I feel for the loss of your Brother, cut off in the pride of life and the bloom of Manhood!”
September 8/10 “Our House is an hospital in every part, and what with my own weakness and distress of mind for my family I have been unhappy enough. And such is the distress of the neighbourhood that I can scarcly find a well person to assist me in looking after the sick.”
October 1 “Have pity upon me, have pity upon me. Oh! thou my beloved for the Hand of God presseth me sore. Oh, my bursting Heart! My Dear Mother has Left me, this day about 5 oclock she left this world for an infinitely better. Tis a dreadful time with this whole province. Sickness and death are in almost every family. I have no more shocking and terible Idea of any Distemper except the Plague than this.”
October 9 “I have just returnd from attending Patty to the Grave. We have great sickness yet in the Town; she made the fourth Corpse that was this day committed to the Ground. We have many others now so bad as to dispair of their lives. The Throat Distemper as well as the Dysentery prevails in this and the Neighbouring Towns.”
Boston Book Club
Since this is our Patriots Day episode, our pick for the Boston Book Club this week is The Road to Concord: How Four Stolen Cannon Ignited the Revolutionary War. It was written by past podcast guest JL Bell, the local historian and writer behind boston1775.net, where he writes a fresh story about the Revolutionary era in Boston every single day. The book details the cat and mouse game that Colonial officials and redcoats played against the revolutionary shadow government in Massachusetts over four small brass cannons that had previously belonged to militia units in Boston. It was intelligence indicating that some of these cannons were in Concord that led General Thomas Gage to order his men to march into the countryside 245 years ago today. Here’s how a reviewer for the US Army’s Military Review Journal describes the book:
Between the fall of 1774 and spring of 1775, there was an arms race between the patriots of the Massachusetts Colony and the British army. Both sides were pursuing possession of all artillery in the region. Unlike muskets, artillery had no use other than for war; it was a weapon of war, and there was a sensing that war was on the horizon. Bell documents that just in September, all publicly owned cannons in Boston and Charlestown had been taken by one side or the other, and in some cases, taken back.
Gage was not only attempting to secure material of war, but he was also determined to locate the cannon and discount the embarrassment of losing the cannon in the first place. Through various sources, he believed the cannon to be located in Concord. Bell posits it was on this seventeen-mile journey to Concord to regain control of the artillery that a skirmish between approximately 250 British soldiers and 70 colonists fueled the start of the American Revolution.
During the 1969–1970 season, the “Big, Bad Bruins,” led by the legendary Bobby Orr, brushed off their perennial losing ways to defeat the St. Louis Blues in the Stanley Cup Finals for their first championship in 29 years. Thomas J. Whalen brings to life all the colorful personalities and iconic players from this Stanley Cup-raising team. Whalen situates this winning season into its historical context as the United States struggled with issues of war, race, politics, and class, making his book a must-read for sports enthusiasts, hockey fans, and those interested in twentieth-century American history.
The talk begins at 2pm. If you’re interested in joining, you’ll need to register to get connection details.
Ghosts and Shadows of Automobile Row, with Ken Liss (episode 180)
Apr 12, 2020
In the early 20th century, car dealerships, tire companies, parts distributors, and other related businesses lined a section of Commonwealth Avenue in Allston that was known as Automobile Row, a sort of urban forefather of the suburban Auto Mile today. Local historian Ken Liss joins the show to tell us what made these early dealerships special, who some of the personalities behind Automobile Row were, and where you can see traces of this history today.
Ken Liss is the president of the Brookline Historical Society who writes and speaks frequently on local history. Head of instruction for the Boston University libraries. He also writes about the history of Brookline and the surrounding area on his blog. After you listen to Ken tell us about Automobile Row, you can get an alternate version of this story via WBUR City Space:
Originally published in 1995, The Forgotten Aquariums of Boston, by Jerry Ryan is a history of the Aquariums in Boston that preceded today’s magnificent New England Aquarium, mostly focusing on the several incarnations of the Boston Aquarial Gardens, which originally opened in April 1859.
The preface to the third edition notes that just 85 years after Paul Revere’s famous ride,
an entirely different kind of ride was taking place in the heart of Boston’s Downtown Crossing. This ride was performed by a woman seated in a nautilus-shaped boat being pulled by a beluga whale through the largest tank in the first aquarium in the United States. If you think that’s incredible, then keep reading. You’re about to unravel a complicated story featuring a brilliant inventor (named Cutting) and an infamous show biz entrepreneur (named Barnum), who managed to circulate 600,000 gallons of seawater from Boston Harbor to Boston Common without electricity. The story begins with banjo-playing, gun-toting harbor seals, proceeds through a den of serpents, and, without giving too much away, features a tragic one-way trip to an asylum.
And the story doesn’t stop there. The book recounts how PT Barnum gradually transformed Boston’s original Aquarial Gardens into more of a zoo, before seizing control and turning into one of his variety shows featuring attractions like General Tom Thumb and the Fiji Mermaid. Then, fifty years after Barnum’s Aquarium closed up shop, the book covers a new aquarium based in South Boston, and how that venture helped spawn today’s New England Aquarium.
Upcoming Event
Does this spring of social distancing have you missing sports? Well, you’re in luck. The Massachusetts Historical Society is hosting a virtual session on April 17th with Red Sox historian Gordon Edes. Bring your questions about the Sox and baseball with this unique event. The MHS says:
Join Red Sox historian Gordon Edes in a virtual Q and A where he will take your questions on one of baseball’s most legendary and celebrated franchises. Subscribers will get access to a curated list of videos from the MHS program archive to watch at home. This content will help viewers engage with Red Sox lore ahead of the question and answer session.
The event is free, but advanced registration is required. After you register, you’ll get the link to join the webinar, as well as links to the videos to review in advance.
It’s hard to believe that it’s already April, but time flies when you’re social distancing. With April comes Patriots Day, one of the most important dates on Boston’s revolutionary calendar. For many families, the reenactment on Lexington Green is a treasured part of their Patriots Day tradition, but of course large gatherings like that are verboten these days. Luckily, the Lexington Historical Society has decided to take Patriots Day online.They have a whole series of events planned from April 18 to 20.
The festivities will start out with a portrayal of Deborah Sampson, who dressed as a man to serve in the Continental Army. On the 18th, Judith Kalaora of History at Play will transform herself first into Deborah Sampson, and then into Robert Shurtleff, the name under which she enlisted in the Army. Then, on Sunday the 19th, children’s author Jenny L Cote will explain what happened on the original Patriots Day by reading selections from her book “The Declaration, the Sword, and the Spy.”
The highlight will come on the 20th, where the famous battle on Lexington Green will be reenacted, not on Lexington Green, but instead on your computer screen.
Many of us know the story of the Battle of Lexington – that the plucky band of local militia faced off against the mighty British army on the town common on April 19, 1775. But what actually happened on the Battle Green that day, and how did we get to that point?
Join us for a deeper dive into the story of that day as we show our award-winning short film First Shot! The Day The Revolution Began. Following this viewing, local reenactors with with experience recreating the battle will be available to answer your questions about the history of the battle, the context of the Revolutionary War, and what it is like to step back in time and relive the past. Rounding off the program will be a performance by Diane Taraz, founder and leader of the Lexington Historical Society Colonial Singers.
How will the events of Patriots Day transition to your laptop screen?
Dr. Thomas Young, the Forgotten Revolutionary, with Scott Nadler (episode 179)
Apr 05, 2020
Doctor Thomas Young was a native of New York’s Hudson Valley who seemed to be present at all of Boston’s revolutionary events, from the creation of the committee of correspondence, to the Boston Massacre, to the Tea Party. He had been an early and influential friend of Ethan Allen, and he was a critic of established religious practice at the time. Though he died early in the Revolutionary War, he was instrumental to the revolutionary movements in New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Vermont. Strategy consultant and independent researcher Scott Nadler will explain who Thomas Young was and why he is a forgotten revolutionary today.
The bicentennial year of 1976 generated lots of interest in and articles about the founding generation, including these profiles of Thomas Young from Pauline Maier and Bruce Henry.
Fifty years ago, Eastern Airways flight 1320 was hijacked on on Saint Patrick’s Day in 1970. The commuter flight from Newark to Boston was beginning its final approach to Logan airport when a scruffy looking passenger pulled out a .38 caliber revolver and demanded access to the cockpit. An article that ran in the Boston Globe this past month under the title “You Don’t Understand Captain, He Has a Gun.”points out that after a series of hijackings in the 60s, they were considered routine, almost a fun adventure for passengers and crew. A political radical would demand passage to Cuba, the crew would give the passengers unlimited free drinks to keep them calm, and then everyone would dine out on the stories for years, after they returned home safely.
This time, it was different. Not long after the hijacker got access to the cockpit, shots rang out. Within moments, the copilot was dead, the pilot was badly wounded, and the hijacker had been shot, beaten, and subdued. It was the first time an American flight had been hijacked with deadly results. The injured pilot managed to turn the plane toward boston, call for help, and land the plane safely at Logan airport. This piece reveals what happened in the air and after the fateful flight landed in Boston. It also profiles everyone from the flight attendants, to the pilot and first officer, to the investigating officers, to a number of passengers.
Despite our recent episode about the crash landing of world flight 30, this story had completely escaped my attention. I hope you find it as interesting as I did. If you don’t subscribe to the Globe, there’s also a slightly less detailed version from 2009 that’s not behind a paywall.
Upcoming Events
We were happy to find two different virtual events coming up for you to be part of. First up, the USS Constitution Museum has begun offering virtual tours of the ship, since they had to close their doors due to the pandemic on March 14. You may see even more than you would on a normal public tour by following the active duty sailors who give tours on Facebook Live every weekday at 1pm. The museum explains by saying,
The active-duty Sailors stationed aboard USS Constitution normally provide free tours and offer public visitation to more than 600,000 people each year as they support the ship’s mission of promoting the Navy’s history, maritime heritage, and raising awareness of the importance of a sustained naval presence.
USS Constitution is following all preventative guidance from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Department of the Defense and Navy leadership. The ship’s active-duty Sailors will take viewers through the ship, to include several areas normally closed to the public, and provide an opportunity to ask live questions.
The ship’s commanding officer, Commander John Benda, adds,
“Our mission is to represent and promote the U.S. Navy, USS Constitution and our nation’s rich maritime history, and through this crisis, we will use our digital presence to continue that mission. We’re committed to provide an engaging, educational experience for our supporters, as we collectively follow the restrictions in place to limit the spread of the Coronavirus.”
Our second event is organized through Plimoth Plantation. If you’ve visited the plantation, you know that along with the English settlement, there’s also a recreated Wampanoag village. When I’ve been there in recent years, I’ve enjoyed the Wampanoag homesite more than the plantation itself, but it took me a long time to realize why. The “Pilgrims” are all reenacting 17th century settlers, only speaking as their characters would have and pretending not to know anything about modern events and inventions. The Wampanoag, on the other hand, take a different approach, as described on the Plantation website:
Unlike the people you’ll meet in the 17th-Century English Village, the staff in the Wampanoag Homesite are not role players. They are all Native People – either Wampanoag or from other Native Nations – and they will be dressed in historically accurate clothing, mostly made of deerskin. They speak from a modern perspective about Wampanoag history and culture. They are happy to see you and will invite you inside a wetu, or tell you what they are growing in the garden, or show you how to play hubbub, a traditional game still enjoyed by many Wampanoag today. The staff in the Wampanoag Homesite are very proud of their Native heritage, and knowledgeable of the traditions, stories, technology, pastimes, music and dance of the people who have lived in this region for more than 10,000 years.
Their ability to bring a modern perspective to traditional folkways is much more helpful to me in understanding the past than the feigned ignorance of the English reenactors. Now, the Wampanoag interpreters are bringing their knowledge to a series of virtual tours. On Monday, April 6 and April 13, you can sign up for a session called History At Home: People of the Dawn. Here’s how they describe it:
Learn about the daily life of the Wampanoag in the 17th century. In this one-hour program, students will explore the connection the Wampanoag and other Native People have to their seasonal way of life, their respect for all living beings, and the ways they continue to carry on their traditions today.
Built in 1637, the Fairbanks House in Dedham is the oldest building in Massachusetts and the oldest wood-framed building in North America. It was occupied by the members of the Fairbanks family for nearly 300 years. In this interview from August 2018, Fairbanks House curator Dan Neff shares evidence he’s uncovered showing that generations of residents, perhaps spanning hundreds of years, used charms and hex marks in an attempt to ward off evil forces that might have included witches, demons, and even disease. That doesn’t mean that the family was irreligious, because belief in magic could actually be reinforced by 17th century Puritan beliefs, which said that the devil was a literal presence in the world that was trying to harm them physically and spiritually, by afflicting them with disease or diverting them from righteousness.
The creepy west wing is in the foreground/on the right
A 17th century hex mark, possibly a St Andrew’s cross, over the hearth in the oldest part of the house
Many patterns of hex marks in the west wing, probably from the 19th century
First floor plan. West wing to the left.
Elevation profile
Over our front door, we included V’s for Mary, St. Andrew’s crosses, and a daisy wheel
Demon trap over the front windows
Invoking Mary in the bathroom
Some people in the Puritan era believed that burying a cat under the doorstep could ward off evil. Our cat didn’t like the sound of that, so we drew this cat on the subfloor under the front door.
Back door
Boston Book Club
When I was first preparing for my interview with Dan Neff, I picked up The Devil’s Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England by Richard Godbeer. Among other things, Godbeer argues that Puritan interest in countermagic arises from a conflict within Puritan theology. Church teachings were ambivalent about the source of evil and temptation. Was evil found within each person’s heart, making the struggle to live morally internal? Or was it found in Satan and demons who walked the earth in physical form, and had to be battled externally? If it was the latter, then the otherwise good, pious Puritans who tried charms or hex marks as a form of countermagic were only using all the weapons in their arsenal to hold off the evil forces that walked among them in the world.
Here’s how the publisher describes the book:
The Devil’s Dominion examines the use of folk magic by ordinary men and women in early New England. The book describes in vivid detail the magical techniques used by settlers and the assumptions which underlaid them. Godbeer argues that layfolk were generally far less consistent in their beliefs and actions than their ministers would have liked; even church members sometimes turned to magic. The Devil’s Dominion reveals that the relationship between magical and religious belief was complex and ambivalent: some members of the community rejected magic altogether, but others did not. Godbeer argues that the controversy surrounding astrological prediction in early New England paralleled clerical condemnation of magical practice, and that the different perspectives on witchcraft engendered by magical tradition and Puritan doctrine often caused confusion and disagreement when New Englanders sought legal punishment of witches.
Upcoming Events
On Tuesday, the Old North Speaker Series will close out Women’s History Month with a virtual event on Zoom:
Join us for a virtual celebration of influential women past and present! Old North Church & Historic Site is excited to offer its first digital speaker series program 10 on 10 Women in the Workforce on March 31 at 6:30pm. In this interactive webinar-style program you’ll hear from ten powerhouse women working in Boston today as they each offer a 5-minute spotlight presentation on a visionary woman from Massachusetts history. Presentations will explore the evolution of women’s professional identities and the ways in which each of these women have paved the way for equal rights. Afterward, stay online for a community chat about intersectional feminism, pay equity, and what we can each do today to advocate for equal rights for all in the workplace. Let’s commemorate one of 2020’s “Equal Pay Days,” March 31, with revelry and solidarity!
On Friday, Historic Beverly is hosting a virtual talk about the United Shoe Machinery Company, which between 1899 and 1976 made everything from shoes to tanks to satellite components in its Beverly factory. As part of Historic Beverly’s First Friday series, they’ll be looking at the role of the shoe in World War II by examining documents from the company archives. Here’s how they describe the event.
During this First Friday, we will be looking at telegraph communications that the United Shoe Boston Offices received during the World War II period, including messages from staff, and factory owners, and shareholders. These correspondence help paint a picture of the landscape of Europe as enemy forces made their way across the country and will give an unseen perspective into the lives of local European citizens during the wartime period.
The Deleterious Effects of Marsh Miasmata (episode 177)
Mar 22, 2020
Instead of profiling a historic Bostonian or bringing you a dramatic story, let’s read a letter together. This brief letter gives an account of a strange and frightening occurrence on Boston’s Long Wharf in the summer of 1797. Along with one delightfully funny incident, the letter includes details about Boston’s infrastructure and commercial port at the turn of the 19th century. Don’t worry, we’ll flesh out the letter with context from other sources, as well.
Detail of a 1796 map
Paul Revere’s view of the British troops landing in 1797
J. Carwitham’s view of Long Wharf
Early 19th century view of the businesses on Long Wharf
Boston Book Club
Centennial of the Boston Pier, Or the Long Wharf Corporation, 1873 is a privately published volume celebrating the 100th anniversary of the company that operated Long Wharf. Because this episode is about Long Wharf, so is the book. It’s basically the minutes of an annual stockholders meeting, so most of it isn’t terribly exciting. There is some early history of Long Wharf, but even that isn’t terribly accurate. However, the otherwise dry tome contains one gem. Oliver Wendall Holmes wrote and recited a poem for the occasion. Check it out!
Upcoming Event
Just a week after announcing that the upcoming event would be cancelled for the duration of our social distancing experiment, a now a handful of groups began scheduling online, virtual, covid-19-safe events. First up is a Wikipedia edit-a-thon on Tuesday, March 31. Simmons University is hosting an online meetup to encourage people to research, create, and expand Wikipedia entries relating to women’s history.
A number of factors contribute to underrepresentation of women’s history on the platform, including the fact that only 10% of Wikipedians are women, meaning that the unconscious biases of male editors can have an outsized effect. Not only that, but female subjects often face a “notability” gap, where articles about even historically significant women are rejected as not being notable enough to justify an article. This gathering will attempt to offset some of that imbalance by focusing on the women who fought for suffrage and civil rights. Here’s how their meetup page describes it:
We are co-hosting an edit-a-thon to help make women’s history more visible on Wikipedia. It’s the second event in our “Digitizing Women’s History series” marking the 100th Anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment.
Our thematic focus is on activists, especially suffrage and civil rights activists who were or are women of color. The event is open to all. Join us whether or not you’ve ever edited Wikipedia entries before!
Keep an eye on their meetup page as they add suggested topics, including specific women whose entries need to be expanded or created, as well as organizations and events to write about. It includes tips on how to write for Wikipedia, potential sources to use for research, and details on how to connect to a Zoom video chat with two mentors during the edit-a-thon.
Epidemics and Public Health in Boston (episode 176)
Mar 15, 2020
I had planned an episode on a different topic for this week, but in light of our current COVID-19 state of emergency, I decided to share some classic clips about Boston’s experiences with epidemics and public health. Speaking of public health, I hope you’re already practicing social distancing, staying at home as much as you can, limiting contact with strangers, and staying six feet away from other people whenever you can. During the 1918 “Spanish” flu, cities that practiced social distancing fared much better than those that didn’t, and in that case Boston was slow to close schools, churches, theaters, and other gathering places. I hope we’ll do better this time around. Along with the 1918 flu pandemic, we’ll be discussing an 1849 cholera epidemic that Boston fought with improved sanitation, and the 1721 smallpox season, when Cotton Mather controversially used traditional African inoculation techniques that he learned from Oneismus, who was enslaved in the Mather household.
The new Netflix movie “Spenser Confidential” stars Mark Wahlberg as a disgraced Boston cop named Spenser. On the day he’s released from prison, his old nemesis, another cop, is murdered. The movie follows his attempt to clear his name, with the help of his aspiring-UFC-fighter roommate, his aging boxing coach, and his volatile ex wife who never met an R she didn’t want to drop. Turns out his nemesis was a dirty cop, embroiled in a drug trafficking scheme that also somehow involves condo developers who want to gentrify Southie, and Spenser and his crew are forced to take on both the cops and the mob to get to the truth.
The movie is… not good. I’m pretty sure they said that Walpole Prison was up in Revere, and the dog track at Wonderland is simultaneously in South Boston and deep in a primeval forest. The murdered dirty cop is supposed to have lived in a giant McMansion in Boston, which is too much to believe exists even in West Roxbury. About the best thing I can say about the film is that some of the aerial shots of Boston are really stunning.
“Spenser Confidential” is loosely based on “Spenser for Hire,” which ran on ABC for three seasons in the late 1980s. I’ve never really gotten into the TV show, but I have always been a fan of the books they’re based on. Robert B Parker wrote 40 Spenser novels between 1973 and his death in 2010. They’re very consciously styled after the hard boiled detective novels of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, with Spenser as an archetype of the jaded private eye with a heart of gold. Parker’s obituary in the Chronicle of Higher Education begins,
Of the many crime writers who have tried on Raymond Chandler’s mantle, few wore it as easily as Robert B. Parker. Parker’s Spenser books form the centerpiece of a body of work that bears Chandler’s torch through the late 20th century and into the 21st, where it continues to light the main roads of the hard-boiled tradition.
Spenser is written as a Korean War vet and former prize fighter, whose wisecracking banter is peppered through with obscure references from English and American literature, and who is more likely to be portrayed whipping up a gourmet meal than pounding back scotch. Below this, you’ll even see a recipe that I adapted from Early Autumn, the seventh novel, where Spenser’s unofficially adopted son Paul is introduced.
After Spenser, his sidekick the inscrutable African American hitman Hawk, and the love of his life Susan Silverman, Boston is the most important character in the series of novels. Before I ever moved to Boston, I felt like I knew this city through the pages of Parker’s novels. From the Harbor Health Club where Hawk and Spenser worked the heavy bag, to Spenser’s shoddy office in the turret of a building at the corner of Mass Ave and Boylston that’s now a Bank of America, I slowly discovered the corners of the real Boston after moving here that I had imagined through Spenser’s eyes for years.
Especially the first few novels are a kind of time capsule of bygone Boston. They were written in a time before gentrification, when the South End and the Fenway were still in the throes of urban blight. It was also the time of busing, when Boston’s racial divide was in the spotlight, and Spenser’s friendship with Hawk was seen as a radical move, even in fiction. Decades before the term “toxic masculinity” was coined, Parker’s Spenser wrestled with what it meant to be a man in modern times. The Chronicle continues,
Parker taught full time for more than a decade, rising to the rank of full professor at Northeastern University. Although he left the classroom in 1979, when his Spenser novels gained marketplace traction, he never ceased to teach. His writing amounts to a decades-long primer on the meaning of “tough.” For Parker, tough was a stance, an ethos, a code, and a worldview, all at once. Through his characters, he acted as the crime genre’s professor of hard-boiled studies for nearly 40 years.
Parker consciously dismantled the stereotype of the hard-boiled tough guy in all his books, and then reassembled it with only the parts he liked, creating detectives who update the image for more progressive times. The essential Parker tenet was that you must be tough, but also soft. The two must coexist, but tough comes first. It means, as Spenser puts it in Thin Air (1995), being able to “control feelings so you won’t be tripping over them while you’re trying to do something useful.”
Soft, on the other hand, means that you have to know yourself fully. Spenser’s longtime partner, Susan Silverman, admits to him that “you let me see your emotions from time to time.” Parker’s tough-soft characters understand the value of home and hearth, and of children, even if they don’t have their own. In Early Autumn (1981), for example, Spenser becomes the guardian of a young child, a responsibility he accepts and takes seriously. Tough-soft is also tolerant. Parker made Spenser ostentatiously gender- and colorblind, working with and trusting a diverse cast of people, particularly gay tough guys, one of whom is a police officer who appears in a number of books.
Above all, tough-soft must be principled. Spenser is so often willing to put financial motives aside that an observer marvels in Small Vices (1997) that having a paying client must be a “nice change of pace.” In short, Parker’s detective is a hard-boiled humanist.
How well has this treatment held up, now almost 50 years after Spenser was first written? Try some of these early Spenser novels on for size, and see for yourself! (You can read more about any of them on this wiki, which I occasionally contributed to in the early 2000s)
The Godwulf Manuscript: This first novel introduces us to Spenser, though the character is not yet fully formed. It will always have a special place in my heart as a Northeastern alum, because Parker so clearly describes the confusing warren of offices in the Holmes/Meserve/Nightingale/Lake complex, where his own office would have been when he taught there.
God Save the Child: This second entry in the series introduces several main characters, including Susan Silverman. With her companionship, Spenser becomes a complete character.
Mortal Stakes: This was the first Spenser novel I ever read. I was probably in eighth grade when my father started laughing so hard he had to set his book down and walk away. I picked it up and read a passage where Spenser reacts to a martial arts master showing off his skills by pulling out his .38 and shooting a heavy bag (similar vibe to Indiana Jones shooting that swordsman in Raiders of the Lost Ark). I was instantly hooked.
Promised Land: With the introduction of Hawk near the end of this novel, the central cast is basically complete. If you’re not hooked by now, you never will be.
Spenser’s Pineapple Pork Chops
“I went to the kitchen and investigated. There were some pork chops. I looked into the cupboard. There was rice. I found some pignolia nuts and some canned pineapple, and some garlic and a can of mandarin oranges. I checked the refrigerator again. There was some all-purpose cream. Heavy would have been better, but one makes do… I cut the eyes out of the pork chops and trimmed them. I threw the rest away.
… I pounded the pork medallions with the back of a butcher knife. I put a little oil into the skillet and heated it and put the pork in to brown. I drank the rest of my Schlitz and opened another can. When the meat was browned, I added a garlic clove. When that had softened, I added some juice from the pineapple and covered the pan. I made rice with chicken broth and pignolia nuts, thyme, parsley, and a bay leaf and cooked it in the oven. After about five minutes, I took the top off the frying pan, let the pineapple juice cook down, added some cream, and let that cook down a little. Then I put in some pineapple chunks and a few mandarin orange segments, shut off the heat, and covered the pan to keep it warm.”
20 oz can of pineapple chunks in pineapple juice, drained, 1 1/4 cup of juice reserved
16 oz can of mandarin orange segments in light syrup, drained
2 cloves of garlic, halved, de-stemmed, and smashed with the flat of your chef’s knife
1/4 cup heavy cream
1 tbsp butter
4 center cut pork chops, tenderized and sprinkled with salt and freshly ground pepper on both sides
3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
Preparation
Rice
Add rice, bay leaf, thyme, and parsley flakes to your ricemaker.
Add chicken stock to the level specified by the directions of your ricemaker, topping off with water as necessary.
Set for White Rice.
Pork Chop and Sauce
When the rice is finishing, start on your pork chops
Heat oil over medium-high heat in a large, heavy bottomed pan.
Brown the pork chops two at a time, about 2-3 minutes per side, until golden brown on both sides, then transfer to a plate.
Add the garlic to the pan, turn the heat down to medium-low, and sauté for a minute or two, until soft and golden, but not scorched, then remove the garlic.
Return heat to high, add the reserved pineapple juice, and scrape the bottom of the pan vigorously with a wooden spoon to loosen any brown bits stuck to the bottom.
Add 3 pineapple chunks and 3 mandarin segments and smush them with your wooden spoon.
In a few minutes, reduce heat to low, and cook until the juice is reduced to a thick syrup, about 5 minutes.
Check pork for doneness, return to pan for a few minutes if needed, and pour any accumulated juices into the pan.
With the heat at its lowest setting, add 1/4 cup heavy cream and 1 tbsp butter and swirl in gently.
Add 3/4 cup pineapple chunks and 1/4 cup mandarin segments and warm gently over very low heat, without boiling.
Turn off heat and serve, with a dollop of rice, a pork chop, and a scoop of sauce per plate.
Upcoming Event
Upcoming events in the Boston area are CANCELLED, and if you know of any that aren’t, they certainly should be!
The Missing Passengers of Flight 30 (episode 175)
Mar 08, 2020
The missing passengers of flight 30
The DC-10 bearing tail number N113WA in happier days. It would later crash in Boston under World Airways livery
Brrrrr… I wouldn’t want to wade or swim through that
Note how close the right wing is to shore
Front view showing the missing cockpit
The website New England Aviation History is a terrific resource and inspiration for any topic related to aviation, especially the early years. We’ve used their articles to help prep for our episodes about the 1910 Boston Harvard Aero Meet, about Amelia Earhart in Boston, and about early balloonists in Boston. The site has sections devoted to plane crashes and other aviation accidents, unsolved mysteries of the air, and aviation history. Within the history section, I’m particularly fond of the subdivisions having to do with long forgotten airports, the airships, flying machines, and general contraptions that early pioneers used to take to the skies… or at least to make an attempt, and the aviation “firsts” that happened in New England.
One notable first is an article about the first balloon ascent in Boston. After taking off from Washington Gardens on Tremont Street, aeronaut Louis Charles Guille crash landed at Ten Hills Farm in Somerville. The flight led to the first aviation-related lawsuit in the Bay State, because the landing destroyed a farmer’s crops. It’s remarkable that even this brief article is backed up by four sources.
If you’re a fan of early aviation, this is a site for you.
Upcoming Event
History Camp Boston is coming up on Saturday, March 14. History Camp is billed as an “unconference,” with no pre-defined theme, and no gatekeepers deciding who gets to present on what topic. Nikki and I have been attending since the first History Camp in 2014, and we’ve learned a lot about the history of Boston, and the world, in the years since. Over the years, The range of expert presenters goes way beyond what you’d find at an academic conference, and the best part is that you don’t need any special credentials or membership to attend. Any old nerd like you or me is welcome.
I’ll be appearing on a panel with fellow podcasters Michael Troy, of the American Revolution Podcast; Ed O’Donnell of In the Past Lane; Susan Otchere Stevenson of American Epistles; and Liz Covart of Ben Franklin’s World. There will also be talks by past podcast guests JL Bell, Eric Peterson, Lori Lyn Price, Shawn Quigley, and Barbara Berenson. I’ll be hoping to reconnect with old friends, meet some of our fans and social media contacts, and recruit future guests to bring on the show.
Note: Unfortunately, History Camp Boston sold out between the time this episode was recorded and when we released it. Bookmark the link and make sure you sign up early next year!
Remembering the Boston Massacre, with Nat Sheidley (episode 174)
Mar 02, 2020
March 5th marks the 250th anniversary of the Boston Massacre, when a party of British soldiers fired into a crowd of civilians, killing five. It was a terrible personal tragedy in a small town of 15,000 residents, and it almost immediately became politicized. Nat Sheidley, the president and CEO of Revolutionary Spaces, is going to remind us what happened on that terrible night, how tightly intertwined the lives of the soldiers and town residents were at the time, and how every generation reinterprets what the tragedy means.
This week’s podcast is sponsored by Liberty & Co, who sell unique products inspired by the American Revolution. In honor of the 250th anniversary of the Boston Massacre, they’re introducing a new offering in their Candles of the Revolution series. The Bloody Boston Massacre Candle smells like musket fire, and it’s molded into a skull-shaped glass jar. If candles aren’t your thing, you select a range of Bloody Boston Massacre products, which bear the design of four coffins that was originally created by Paul Revere to remember the victims of the massacre. Or you can opt for a coffee mug bearing the likeness of John Adams and the phrase “facts are stubborn things,” which Adams made famous as part of his defense of the redcoats against murder charges. Save 20% on any purchase with the discount code HUBHISTORY.
Henry Pelham
Paul Revere
The plate Revere used to create his engraving is at the Commonwealth Museum
Revere’s Sketch Map
During this week’s interview, Nat Sheidley pointed out how completely shocking the violence of the Boston Massacre would have been in a small town of 15,000 residents. Not only did everyone in town know one another, but by early 1770, they all knew the occupying British soldiers, as well. After about 18 months of living side by side, the locals and the redcoats were tied together by commercial relationships, friendships, romances, and more. In describing these connections, Nat recommended the book The Boston Massacre: a Family History, by Serena Zabin, which was published just a couple of weeks ago. I haven’t had a chance to pick it up yet, but based on Nat’s recommendation and the buzz I’ve seen on Twitter, it sounds like a fascinating read. Here’s the publisher’s description:
The story of the Boston Massacre—when on a late winter evening in 1770, British soldiers shot five local men to death—is familiar to generations. But from the very beginning, many accounts have obscured a fascinating truth: the Massacre arose from conflicts that were as personal as they were political.
Professor Serena Zabin draws on original sources and lively stories to follow British troops as they are dispatched from Ireland to Boston in 1768 to subdue the increasingly rebellious colonists. And she reveals a forgotten world hidden in plain sight: the many regimental wives and children who accompanied these armies. We see these families jostling with Bostonians for living space, finding common cause in the search for a lost child, trading barbs and and sharing baptisms. Becoming, in other words, neighbors. When soldiers shot unarmed citizens in the street, it was these intensely human, now broken bonds that fueled what quickly became a bitterly fought American Revolution.
Upcoming Event
Revolutionary Spaces has an entire year of programming built around the commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the Boston Massacre. Starting this week, there will be living history events, theatrical productions, public art, and more. Gather at Old South Meeting House on Thursday, March 5th to mark the anniversary with modern interpretations of the Massacre orations by prominent Boston personalities. Then on Saturday, there will be a full day of events at Old South Meeting House, the Old State House, and the streets in between, culminating with a recreation of the massacre. A week after the anniversary, return to Old South Meeting House on March 12 to see a costumed actor recreate Joseph Warren’s famous 1775 Boston Massacre oration. And watch the Revolutionary Spaces website for more events as they’re announced throughout the year.
Remembering the Boston Massacre, with Nat Sheidley (episode 174)
Mar 01, 2020
March 5th marks the 250th anniversary of the Boston Massacre, when a party of British soldiers fired into a crowd of civilians, killing five. It was a terrible personal tragedy in a small town of 15,000 residents, and it almost immediately became politicized. Nat Sheidley, the president and CEO of Revolutionary Spaces, is going to remind us what happened on that terrible night, how tightly intertwined the lives of the soldiers and town residents were at the time, and how every generation reinterprets what the tragedy means.
This week’s podcast is sponsored by Liberty & Co, who sell unique products inspired by the American Revolution. In honor of the 250th anniversary of the Boston Massacre, they’re introducing a new offering in their Candles of the Revolution series. The Bloody Boston Massacre Candle smells like musket fire, and it’s molded into a skull-shaped glass jar. If candles aren’t your thing, you select a range of Bloody Boston Massacre products, which bear the design of four coffins that was originally created by Paul Revere to remember the victims of the massacre. Or you can opt for a coffee mug bearing the likeness of John Adams and the phrase “facts are stubborn things,” which Adams made famous as part of his defense of the redcoats against murder charges. Save 20% on any purchase with the discount code HUBHISTORY.
Henry Pelham
Paul Revere
The plate Revere used to create his engraving is at the Commonwealth Museum
Revere’s Sketch Map
During this week’s interview, Nat Sheidley pointed out how completely shocking the violence of the Boston Massacre would have been in a small town of 15,000 residents. Not only did everyone in town know one another, but by early 1770, they all knew the occupying British soldiers, as well. After about 18 months of living side by side, the locals and the redcoats were tied together by commercial relationships, friendships, romances, and more. In describing these connections, Nat recommended the book The Boston Massacre: a Family History, by Serena Zabin, which was published just a couple of weeks ago. I haven’t had a chance to pick it up yet, but based on Nat’s recommendation and the buzz I’ve seen on Twitter, it sounds like a fascinating read. Here’s the publisher’s description:
The story of the Boston Massacre—when on a late winter evening in 1770, British soldiers shot five local men to death—is familiar to generations. But from the very beginning, many accounts have obscured a fascinating truth: the Massacre arose from conflicts that were as personal as they were political.
Professor Serena Zabin draws on original sources and lively stories to follow British troops as they are dispatched from Ireland to Boston in 1768 to subdue the increasingly rebellious colonists. And she reveals a forgotten world hidden in plain sight: the many regimental wives and children who accompanied these armies. We see these families jostling with Bostonians for living space, finding common cause in the search for a lost child, trading barbs and and sharing baptisms. Becoming, in other words, neighbors. When soldiers shot unarmed citizens in the street, it was these intensely human, now broken bonds that fueled what quickly became a bitterly fought American Revolution.
Upcoming Event
Revolutionary Spaces has an entire year of programming built around the commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the Boston Massacre. Starting this week, there will be living history events, theatrical productions, public art, and more. Gather at Old South Meeting House on Thursday, March 5th to mark the anniversary with modern interpretations of the Massacre orations by prominent Boston personalities. Then on Saturday, there will be a full day of events at Old South Meeting House, the Old State House, and the streets in between, culminating with a recreation of the massacre. A week after the anniversary, return to Old South Meeting House on March 12 to see a costumed actor recreate Joseph Warren’s famous 1775 Boston Massacre oration. And watch the Revolutionary Spaces website for more events as they’re announced throughout the year.
The Last Women Jailed for Suffrage (episode 173)
Feb 23, 2020
On February 24, 1919, President Woodrow Wilson visited Boston on his way home from the peace conference that ended World War I, expecting to find adoring supporters. Instead, he was greeted by members of the National Women’s Party. After a long campaign that had the 19th amendment on the verge of passing, they now blamed Wilson for dragging his feet and shifting his attention from suffrage to the peace treaty and the League of Nations. The protesters marched to the Massachusetts State House, where they refused to disperse for the president’s arrival. 25 women were arrested and taken to the Charles Street Jail, where sixteen of them would become known as the last women to be jailed for suffrage.
A remarkable tale of the woman who drove the fight for women’s suffrage.
Former Boston Globe journalist Cassidy, now chief content officer for InkHouse, chronicles the life of Alice Paul, a Quaker from New Jersey who became one of the leaders in the struggle for women’s rights in the early 1900s—and beyond. She was the daughter of a wealthy banker and earned multiple graduate degrees. While she was studying social justice in Birmingham, England, she was profoundly moved by the “suffragettes” Christabel Pankhurst and her mother, Emmeline. Raised to expect equality for all, she stayed in London and joined the fight. She was arrested multiple times in six months, went on a hunger strike, and suffered permanent physical damage from force-feeding. Running parallel to Paul’s story, Cassidy gives us the background of the suffragist’s biggest stumbling block, Woodrow Wilson. Born in Virginia, his father, a minister, authored a booklet outlining his misguided argument for how the Bible condones slavery. Wilson’s outlook was firmly fixed along those lines, and he even said, “universal suffrage is at the foundation of every evil in this country.” He cast himself as a progressive, but that didn’t include women or blacks. Paul joined the fight for equality in America, a struggle that was not as confrontational as England’s but just as dedicated. While those in charge fought for states’ resolutions, she felt an amendment to the Constitution was absolutely necessary. To say Paul was the driving force is not an exaggeration. She was tireless, always sure of her tactics and willing to endure many setbacks, arrests, and Wilson’s continued obstinacy. Dedicated women like Inez Milholland, Alva Belmont, and Lucy Burns stood right beside her.
This book should be required reading until Alice Paul becomes a household name. She not only fought for voting rights and the 19th Amendment; she kept fighting for another 50 years.
Upcoming Event
Like this week’s podcast, the upcoming talk called Sartorial Suffrage at the Boston Athenaeum was also inspired by the centennial of suffrage in the US. It will be led by Dr. Kimberly Alexander of UNH, Sara Georgini of the Adams Papers at the MHS, and Theo Tyson, who is a fellow of American Art and Culture at the Athenaeum. Together, they’ll look at the cultural connections between women’s fashion and the political movements for and against women’s suffrage. Here’s how the Athenaeum describes it:
In celebration of International Women’s Day 2020, we will take the afternoon to discuss the implications and influences of fashion, clothing, and dress on the women’s suffrage movement. Theo Tyson – who curated the Athenaeum’s current installation “(Anti)SUFFRAGE” – will use the installation as a point of departure to delve into the dogma, designs, and demands of suffrage and anti-suffrage attire. She will be joined by fashion historians Sara Georgini, Series Editor for the Papers of John Adams, part of the Adams Papers editorial project at the Massachusetts Historical Society and author of Household Gods: The Religious Lives of the Adams Family and Kimberly Alexander, PhD, Lecturer in Museum Studies at the University of New Hampshire and author of Treasures Afoot: Shoe Stories from the Georgian Era. Guided tours of our current installation (Anti)SUFFRAGE will be held immediately following the conversation.
The event will begin at noon on Friday, March 6. It is free for Athenaeum members and $10 for nonmembers. Advanced registration is required.
The Red Scare in Park Square (episode 172)
Feb 16, 2020
Draft riots are nothing new in Boston. A 1970 protest at Northeastern University over the draft and the Vietnam War devolved into a riot. In 1863, the North End was torn by a draft riot that ended with the militia firing a cannon at a crowd of mostly Irish-American men, women, and children. We even covered a violent 1747 riot in which Bostonians resisted forced impressment into the Royal Navy. What all those incidents have in common, though, is that the rioters were opposed to the draft. The riot on July 1, 1917 was different. In that case, rioters supported the draft and focused their violence on antiwar protesters.
14 Park Square in better days
As the building is being sacked
The uniformed mob telling concert-goers when to take off their hats
Enter the Bluejackets
The scene in Park Square
“The Modern Gray Champion,” written by a pacifist and former child prodigy, this short story resurrects Hawthorne’s mythical hero and has him inspire the Park Square socialists.
The Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen denounces the “rowdyism” in Boston.
The director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra is arrested and deported in 1917, after refusing to open every performance with the national anthem.
News/Wire Service Stories
July 2 San Diego Union and Daily Bee, details on banner slogans, demands of the marchers. “lt was a bad day for Socialism and Socialists in Boston today. Their parade and anti-conscription demonstration was broken up as a result of a number of riots centering on Boston Common.”
French sociologist Sylvie Tissot’s book Good Neighbors: Gentrifying Diversity in Boston’s South End ruffled a lot of feathers when it was published in 2015. She was accused of using her position at Harvard and French accent to ingratiate herself with the wealthy residents of the South End. They opened up to Tissot about their experiences in the neighborhood, then felt betrayed by her portrayal of their relationships with marginalized communities. Here’s how the publisher describes the book:
Does gentrification destroy diversity? Or does it thrive on it? Boston’s South End, a legendary working-class neighborhood with the largest Victorian brick row house district in the United States and a celebrated reputation for diversity, has become in recent years a flashpoint for the problems of gentrification. It has born witness to the kind of rapid transformation leading to pitched battles over the class and race politics throughout the country and indeed the contemporary world.
This subtle study of a storied urban neighborhood reveals the way that upper-middle-class newcomers have positioned themselves as champions of diversity, and how their mobilization around this key concept has reordered class divisions rather than abolished them.
Upcoming Event
As part of Black History Month at Boston Public Library, Dr. Kelley Carter Jackson of Wellesley College will be presenting on her recent book Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence. Published in 2019, Jackson’s book explores the tension within the abolitionist movement between (often white) activists who were committed to nonviolence, and a rising tide of Black radicals who believed that it was time to take freedom rather than waiting for it to be given. Here’s how the BPL website describes the event:
In honor of Black history month, join us for a meaningful experience with Dr. Kellie Carter Jackson. Her new book, Force & Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence (University of Pennsylvania Press), examines the conditions that led some black abolitionists to believe slavery might only be abolished by violent force. In Force and Freedom, Carter Jackson provides the first historical analysis exclusively focused on the tactical use of violence among antebellum black activists. Go beyond the honorable politics of moral suasion and the romanticism of the Underground Railroad and into an exploration of the agonizing decisions, strategies, and actions of the black abolitionists who, though lacking an official political voice, were nevertheless responsible for instigating monumental social and political change.
The talk begins at 6pm on February 25 at the Copley branch, admission is free, and registration is not required. Copies of the book will be offered for sale by Trident booksellers at the event, and Dr. Jackson will be on hand to sign them.
Dr. Rebecca Crumpler’s Headstone
Long-time listeners may recall episode 18, in which we discussed the incredible life of Dr Rebecca Lee Crumpler, the first black female medical doctor trained in the United States, who graduated in 1864 from the New England Female Medical College in Boston. Dr. Crumpler and her husband Arthur Crumpler are buried in an unmarked grave at Fairview Cemetery in Hyde Park. The Friends of the Hyde Park Library and the Hyde Park Historical Society are currently raising $5,000 for a simple gravestone to honor these two remarkable individuals. Please consider donating to this worthy cause.
Little Women in Boston (episode 171)
Feb 09, 2020
You don’t grow up to walk two steps behind your husband when you’ve met Jo March. The same could be said of Louisa May Alcott, in which case you may not take a husband at all, choosing instead to paddle your own canoe. It has been said that, with the penning of the semi-autobiographical novel Little Women, Alcott launched the notion of the of the All American Girl. With both Sewall and Quincy ancestry, a sharp mind coupled with a determination to succeed, and a life guided by progressive values, Alcott herself was certainly an All Boston Girl. Learn about Louisa May Alcott’s long journey to overnight success, and hear how Sirena Abalian portrays Jo in the Wheelock Family Theater’s production of Little Women, the Musical.
National Parks Service profile on the Wayside/Hillside. The Wayside is part of the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom program, administered by the National Park Service. This program commemorates and preserves the historical significance of the Underground Railroad which sought to address the injustices of slavery and make freedom a reality in the United States and is a crucial element in the evolution of our national civil rights movement.
Hillside/Wayside
Orchard House
Orchard House
Louisa May Alcott’s grave
Boston Book Club
Stephanie Schorow’sInside the Combat Zone: The Stripped Down Story of Boston’s Most Notorious Neighborhoods harkens back to an era before internet porn. Back then, anyone seeking adult entertainment had to not only leave their homes, they had to visit the seedy side of downtown Boston. Here’s how the author’s website describes the book:
Upscale restaurants, majestic theaters, and luxury condos line the streets of downtown Boston today. Students, office workers, doctors, and shoppers navigate the busy sidewalks along Washington and Boylston Streets, giving little thought to the historical significance of their surroundings. The bustle distracts passersby from what may be the city’s dirtiest little secret: these blocks were once home to Boston’s most notorious neighborhood. The Combat Zone, a five-plus-acre, city- sanctioned adult entertainment district, was as sordid and alluring as anything found in Amsterdam or Vegas. Indeed, Boston’s now tony neighborhood once resembled the set of HBO’s The Deuce, all with the blessing of city officials.
Schorow recounts the stories that made the Zone infamous. Meet the dancers who stripped to punk rock, the cops who tried to keep order on the streets, and the hookers who turned tricks and slipped wallets from gullible tourists. Go beyond the enticing marquees promoting all-nude revues to discover how the Zone—in an era dogged by miserable economics— remained one of Boston’s most profitable neighborhoods.
With Inside the Combat Zone, Schorow examines the constitutional and societal issues that led Boston to engineer an audacious social experiment, heralded across the nation as the solution to the pornography epidemic. She introduces the players who made it all possible and the antics and tragedies that unfolded as a result of their decisions. The streets come alive through interviews with former city planners, strippers, and porn merchants. Some nostalgically recall the Combat Zone as a seductive adult playground where men and women alike found the freedom to express themselves; others remember it as a dangerous, crime-ridden neighborhood. Schorow deftly captures a moment in Boston’s history that helped shape the city today—and that will likely never be seen again.
Upcoming Event
In honor of Presidents’ Day, our friends over at Boston By Foot have devised special walking tours that will allow you to see Boston through the eyes of our first two Presidents. Both tours begin at 1pm, both tours cost $15 for non-members, and both tours meet near the Old State House. George Washington is up first, with a tour on Saturday, February 16. Here’s how Boston By Foot describes it:
This walk follows the first President on his six-day visit to Boston as part of his post-inaugural tour of New England 230 years ago, in October 1789. In 1789, Boston was on the cusp of transformation, its economy rebounding from the war years, with its advances in industry, technology, and commerce on show for this most important of visitors. Boston in 1789 was still a town, not a city. Charles Bulfinch had yet to create his many churches and civic landmarks, and the hills of the Shawmut Peninsula were not yet plundered for their gravel and landfill. [Side note: you can get more context for Boston in 1789 from episode 147, where we trace the trial and execution of the so-called pirate Rachel Wall. Wall was the last woman to be executed in Massachusetts, and she was hanged on the Common just days before Washington’s presidential visit.] In part, we will walk the route of the civic parade organized for Washington’s arrival; stop by many of the sites where he visited, worshipped, and – yes – slept; and learn about Governor Hancock’s political miscalculation when President Washington came to town.
And because even now, almost 225 years later, John Adams still plays second fiddle to George Washington, the Adams family tour will be held on Monday, February 17. Their description begins with the words of 24 year old John Adams describing the bustling town of Boston in 1759:
“My Eyes are so diverted with Chimney Sweeps, Carriers of Wood, Merchants, Ladies, Priests, Carts, Horses, Oxen, Coaches, Market men and Women, Soldiers, Sailors, and my Ears with the Rattle Gabble of them all…”
Follow the words and history of four generations of Adamses, from their experiences at the Old State House, through Beacon Hill, and into Back Bay. John, Abigail, and their descendants were prolific writers. The trove of documents they left behind intimately describe their lives, public service, and Boston from the eve of the Revolution to the turn of the twentieth century.
Dr. Rebecca Crumpler’s Headstone
Long-time listeners may recall episode 18, in which we discussed the incredible life of Dr Rebecca Lee Crumpler, the first black female medical doctor trained in the United States, who graduated in 1864 from the New England Female Medical College in Boston. Dr. Crumpler and her husband Arthur Crumpler are buried in an unmarked grave at Fairview Cemetery in Hyde Park. The Friends of the Hyde Park Library and the Hyde Park Historical Society are currently raising $5,000 for a simple gravestone to honor these two remarkable individuals. Please consider donating to this worthy cause.
The Millen Gang Machine Gun Murders (episode 170)
Feb 02, 2020
86 years ago today, on February 2, 1934, the first murders were committed in Massachusetts using a fully automatic weapon. Sadly, the victims were the first police officers to be killed in the line of duty in the sleepy Boston suburb of Needham. At the center of the case were a stolen Tommy gun, a pair of brothers, and a ragtag assortment of followers. Before it was all over, the Millen-Faber gang would be tied to at least five murders, a long string of robberies, and an attempted jailbreak. Three of the crew would be sentenced to death, and the shocking spectacle of military grade weapons being used on the streets of a quiet Boston suburb would stoke the already raging debate about gun control and the 1934 federal firearms act.
Britney Jasnoff, executive editor of Boston Magazine, joins us for a brief interview about a piece in the January/February 2020 issue called “Return to our Roots.” It discusses the recent trend of using DNA testing to uncover family history and genealogy, and it explores travel destinations that Bostonians can trace their genetic heritage back to. From Puerto Rico to Vietnam to Ireland, the package includes travel itineraries, personal narratives of Bostonians who have traveled to get in touch with their roots, and the 10 commandments of heritage travel. Read the piece online, or look for it on newsstands now.
Upcoming Event
As part of the Boston Public Library’s Black History Month seminar series, Katie Woods will be presenting about the Women’s Era Club at the Mattapan branch library at 3:30pm on February 12. The Women’s Era started out as the first newspaper published for African American women, founded in Boston by activist Josephine St Pierre Ruffin in 1890. A few years later, she started the club as an offshoot, where African American women could work together toward the lofty goal of making the world a better place. Here’s how the BPL website describes the talk:
In 1893, a group of Boston women founded the Women’s Era Club, one of the first woman’s clubs in the country led by African American women. With its journal, The Woman’s Era, this club’s mission of social activism reached national audiences. What causes were these women fighting for, and how were they treated by majority-white organizations? Join SCA Public History Intern Katie Woods as we explore the little-known yet influential club and publication, as well as the women behind these instruments of social change.
Trunk Tragedy in the City of Shoes (episode 169)
Jan 26, 2020
In February 1879, Jennie Clarke’s body was found jammed into a leather trunk on the bank of the Saugus river on her 20th birthday. Every detail of the case reveals yet another tragedy in the life of Jennie Clarke, who died after attempting to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, and it reveals the unexpectedly permissive approach of Massachusetts law to abortion in the mid-1800s.
This week’s Boston Book Club pick is a 43 minute long documentary film made in 1957 and narrated by longtime local news anchor Jack Chase. It introduces us to The MassPike, which was a brand new wonder of technology and transportation planning at the time. Big thanks to Max Finkel of Jalopnik for sharing the film earlier this month.
Upcoming Event
The Gibson House museum in the Back Bay has long been a fairly obscure museum, but it’s enjoying a moment in the sun after being featured in the recent Little Women movie. Longtime listeners will recognize it as our featured historic site of the week back in episode 58. The museum is a unique time capsule of Victorian Boston, as it was built in 1860, only very minimally updated since then, and left completely untouched since its last owner died in 1954.
That last owner was Charles Gibson, Junior, who grew up in the house, and then moved back in after his father’s death in 1916. He cultivated a persona as the ultimate Boston Brahmin, a throwback to an earlier era. A later profile in the Boston Herald described him as “a Proper Bostonian whose Victorian elegance puts modern manners to shame,” and “a small man…with a nimble, if sometimes cantankerous physique…He strolls around with a sort of swagger stick with a silver tip out of deference to the fact that gold would be too vulgar.” He affected an English accent and was always quick to mention his ties to the elites of Boston, London, and Paris.
Charles Junior maintained his eccentric ways right up until the end. Into the 1950s, he kept up a habit of walking to the Ritz Carlton Hotel every night, where he would take his dinner in a full tuxedo and tails, top hat, and a raccoon coat in cold weather. His neighbors would call him Mr. Boston.
At the time that we featured the house, we tiptoed around questions of Charles Junior’s sexuality. He was a lifelong bachelor, and he wrote a book of love sonnets that never mention a woman, but at the time, museum curators were happy to respect his privacy and deflect those types of inquiries. That attitude has changed, and the museum is embracing their founder’s personal history with a series of house tours on three upcoming Fridays. Called “Charlie Gibson’s Queer Boston,” here’s how the Gibson House website describes the tour:
Explore the Gibson House and early-twentieth-century Boston through Charlie Gibson’s eyes! The story of the museum’s founder is one of legacy and family history; of the fading grandeur of Victorian-era Boston; and of the role gay men, like Charlie, had in the historic preservation movement. This unique specialty house tour is not to be missed!
The tour will be held at 4pm on January 31, February 28, and March 27. Tickets are available at the door for $10, or $8 for students.
Massachusetts in the Woman Suffrage Movement, with Barbara Berenson (episode 168)
Jan 19, 2020
Author Barbara F. Berenson joins us this week to discuss her book Massachusetts in the Woman Suffrage Movement: Revolutionary Reformers. She’s also the author of Boston in the Civil War: Hub of the Second Revolution, and Walking Tours of Civil War Boston: Hub of Abolitionism. In the interview, she tells us about the critical roles that Massachusetts women played in the fight for women’s right to vote and step fully into the public sphere.
Barbara F. Berenson is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School who retired from her position as Senior Attorney at the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in June 2019. In addition to researching and writing, she serves on the Boards of Boston By Foot and the Royall House & Slave Quarters.
How have American women voted in the first 100 years since the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment? How have popular understandings of women as voters both persisted and changed over time? In A Century of Votes for Women, Christina Wolbrecht and J. Kevin Corder offer an unprecedented account of women voters in American politics over the last ten decades. Bringing together new and existing data, the book provides unique insight into women’s (and men’s) voting behavior and traces how women’s turnout and vote choice evolved across a century of enormous transformation overall and for women in particular. Wolbrecht and Corder show that there is no such thing as ‘the woman voter’; instead they reveal considerable variation in how different groups of women voted in response to changing political, social, and economic realities. The book also demonstrates how assumptions about women as voters influenced politicians, the press, and scholars.
Christina Wolbrecht is professor of political science, director of the Rooney Center for the Study of American Democracy, and Mr. and Mrs. C. Robert Hanley Director of the Washington Program at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of A Century of Votes for Women: American Elections Since Suffrage (with J. Kevin Corder), Counting Women’s Ballots: Female Voters from Suffrage Through the New Deal (with Corder), and The Politics of Women’s Rights: Parties, Positions, and Change, as well as articles on women as political role models, the representation of women, and party positions on education policy.
The talk begins at 6:00pm, and advanced registration is required. It’s free for Athenaeum members and $15 for non-members.
The Hub of the Gay Universe, with Russ Lopez (episode 167)
Jan 12, 2020
Dr. Russ Lopez joins us this week to discuss his recent book, The Hub of the Gay Universe: An LGBTQ History of Boston, Provincetown, and Beyond. Russ called in from a vacation in California to talk about Puritan attitudes toward sin and sodomy, the late 19th century golden age for LGBTQ Boston, the tragic toll of the AIDS crisis, and the long fight for marriage equality.
Dr. Russ Lopez has a background in urban planning, studying cities, neighborhoods, and the links between the urban environment and public health. He teaches at the Boston University School of Public Health, and he’s published three books related to that field. When he’s not busy studying, teaching, and writing about public health, he researches the history of Boston. The Hub of the Gay Universe is the third book he’s published in this area, following Boston’s South End: The Clash of Ideas in a Historic Neighborhood and Boston 1945-2015: The Decline and Rise of a Great World City. His new book traces the LGBTQ history of Boston and Provincetown from the moment the Pilgrims first encountered Provincetown in 1620 to the referendum that put trans rights on the ballot in 2018.
This week’s event Sarah’s Long Walk for Equality, a throwback to episode 162, where I discussed the 1849 Supreme Judicial Court case that formed the legal basis for school segregation. On February 1st, a Ranger from the National Park Service will be appearing at the Mattapan branch of the BPL to discuss that very case, Roberts v Boston. Here’s how the library website describes the event:
Since its founding, Boston has had a strong focus on public education, but not everyone had access to the same education. A young girl of color, named Sarah Roberts, forced Bostonians to acknowledge this inequality when she and her father sued the City of Boston because of the evident inequity in the Public Education System.
If you missed our show about Roberts v Boston, and you want to learn how a case meant to end segregation in Boston Public Schools backfired and created the legal framework for Jim Crow, you’ll want to check out this talk. It’s scheduled for 1pm on Saturday, February 1st, and it will be held at the Mattapan library on Blue Hill Ave.
John Brown’s Body (episode 166)
Jan 05, 2020
The most popular song of the Union Army during the Civil War was inspired by the most hated man in America, it borrowed the tune from an old church hymn, and it was first sung right here in the Boston Harbor Islands. In this week’s episode, learn about the double meaning behind the title of the song, its holy and profane lyrics, and the tragic history of the “Hallelujah Regiment” who made it famous. The 12th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment marched out of Boston in 1861 with 1040 men and a song in their hearts, but when they returned three years later, they numbered just 85, and they had vowed never to sing their famous song again.
When it was published in 1994, David Hackett Fischer’s epic Paul Revere’s Ride was the first scholarly treatment of the events of April 19, 1775. Too many people were too familiar with the legend of Paul Revere’s ride, and serious historians more or less ignored the reality of the event. That changed with Fischer’s book. It uses primary sources to not only reconstruct the events of that fateful night in exacting detail, but also to reconstruct the world that Paul Revere lived in, both before and after his ride. We used Fischer’s book as a source for episode 76, about Paul Revere’s other rides around Massachusetts and New England.
Here’s how the publisher describes it:
In Paul Revere’s Ride, David Hackett Fischer fashions an exciting narrative that offers deep insight into the outbreak of revolution and the emergence of the American republic. Beginning in the years before the eruption of war, Fischer illuminates the figure of Paul Revere, a man far more complex than the simple artisan and messenger of tradition. Revere ranged widely through the complex world of Boston’s revolutionary movement–from organizing local mechanics to mingling with the likes of John Hancock and Samuel Adams. When the fateful night arrived, more than sixty men and women joined him on his task of alarm–an operation Revere himself helped to organize and set in motion. Fischer recreates Revere’s capture that night, showing how it had an important impact on the events that followed. He had an uncanny gift for being at the center of events, and the author follows him to Lexington Green–setting the stage for a fresh interpretation of the battle that began the war. Drawing on intensive new research, Fischer reveals a clash very different from both patriotic and iconoclastic myths. The local militia were elaborately organized and intelligently led, in a manner that had deep roots in New England. On the morning of April 19, they fought in fixed positions and close formation, twice breaking the British regulars. In the afternoon, the American officers switched tactics, forging a ring of fire around the retreating enemy which they maintained for several hours–an extraordinary feat of combat leadership. In the days that followed, Paul Revere led a new battle– for public opinion–which proved even more decisive than the fighting itself.
Upcoming Event
On January 14, the Lexington Historical Society will be hosting one of their periodic Book Group meetings, and the topic will be “Massachusetts in the Woman Suffrage Movement” by future podcast guest Barbara Berenson.
Here’s what the Lexington Historical Society says:
This month’s book will help you get up to speed on the history behind the 2020 centennial of the 19th amendment granting women the right to vote! “Massachusetts in the Woman Suffrage Movement” removes the story of the suffrage from the singular mythology of Seneca Falls, deepening the movement to Worcester, greater New England, and the far reaches of the West. Her untold histories touch upon the complicated nature of the movement made even messier by aspects of politics, class, and race.
It’s a discussion group, so it would probably be helpful to read the book in advance. The event will be held at the Lexington Historical Society’s depot building at 13 Depot Square in downtown Lexington, and it will begin at 6pm on Tuesday, January 14. Bring your book, your notes, and an appetite. Admission is $35 for non-members, but that includes a catered dinner from Neillio’s in Lexington.
The 1689 Uprising in Boston, revisited (episode 165)
Dec 29, 2019
Early one April morning, the people of Boston rose up in revolt against the royal government of Massachusetts. Militia marched in the streets, while an alarm brought more armed men from towns all over the area. Soon, the rebels controlled the mainland, while the royal navy still commanded the harbor. You might think I mean the “shot heard ‘round the world” that started the American Revolution in Lexington. Instead, we’re talking about the 1689 Boston revolt, when the people rose up and overthrew their royal governor, 86 years and one day before the battles at Lexington and Concord.
Our header image is the 1691 charter of Massachusetts issued by William and Mary, which you can see at the Commonwealth Museum.
Boston Book Club
A few months ago, the Journal of the American Revolution published an article by Alexander Cain called “Massachusetts Privateers During the Siege of Boston.” A frigate belonging to the Royal Navy plays a key part in this week’s story of the 1689 Boston uprising, but of course, the Navy would play an even more central role in the siege of Boston in 1775 and 1776. After patriot forces surrounded Boston, the occupying redcoats could no longer trade with the surrounding countryside for food, fuel, and other supplies. At first, they tried to buy or confiscate supplies from farms on the Boston Harbor Islands. Because the islands were small, and because the patriots began opposing these missions, this strategy didn’t last very long. By the late fall of 1775, the British Army and Navy, as well as the people of Boston would be heavily dependent on supplies brought in from the Caribbean, Canada, and the British Isles.
Success for the patriot cause depended on cutting these long supply lines and starving the British out. By the end of 1775, Congress had authorized the new Continental Navy, and Massachusetts was building its own naval force. However, neither of them had any significant capabilities before the siege ended. Instead, Massachusetts would rely on privateers to chase, engage, and hopefully capture the merchant vessels that were bringing supplies to Boston. Privateering is often described as legalized piracy, with privately owned and employed ships and crews authorized by a government to take on an enemy’s ships for profit. By the end of 1775, Massachusetts was cranking out dozens, perhaps hundreds, of the letters of marque that authorized a privateer. The article says, “these privateers traveled in groups that varied in size from a few ships to over twenty. One such squadron from Newburyport consisted of twenty-five vessels and over 2,800 men. A second from the same town boasted thirty vessels.”
The article uses sources from both sides of the war to outline how successful the privateer soon were. The patriots gloat about the sheer number of vessels their privateers were capturing, which not only denied supplies to the enemy, but also helped their army with stores of food, weapons, and vast stocks of ammunition. On the Redcoat side, hardship was the watchword, as fall turned to winter, and the situation in Boston became desperate. Private soldiers blamed their officers, and in many cases, the officers blamed British Admiral Samuel Graves, who they thought was being too cautious with his fleet, securing them in Boston Harbor instead of pursuing the privateer menace.
This talk looks at the ways women used non-republican methods of politicking on behalf of the United States while abroad in Europe, focusing on Abigail Adams’s time abroad in London and Paris. Situating Adams in an international and diplomatic context highlights the ways she influenced American foreign and domestic policy while abroad. Using five different themes— letters, politics and political intrigue, money and economic diplomacy, social networks, and republicanism and aristocracy abroad— this work analyzes her politicking in Europe.
The talk is free and open to the public with no reservations. Just bring a brown bag lunch to enjoy while Ms Lieberman speaks.
Classic Tales from Early Boston (episode 164)
Dec 22, 2019
In lieu of a brand new story, this week we are sharing two classic tales from the earliest years of Puritan Boston. One of them might be considered comedy, while the other is high drama. First, we’ll visit the diaries of Boston founder John Winthrop and find two accounts of unexplained lights in the sky and other phenomena that might have been the first UFO sightings in Boston. After that, we’ll fast forward to the era of the English Civil Wars, when two men who had signed the death warrant for a king decided that Boston was the only safe refuge from his heir’s assassins.
For more on the 1689 uprising against Sir Edmund Andros in Boston, check out HUB History Episode 6.
Our header image is the death warrant for King Charles I. See the signatures of Whalley (far left) and Goffe (center) highlighted below.
Boston Book Club
Our pick for the Boston Book Club this week is a recent episode of the podcast In episode 267 of the podcast Ben Franklin’s World, host Liz Covart interviews Thomas Wickman, the author of a book called Snowshoe Country: An Environmental and Cultural History of Winter in the Early Northeast. Set mostly in the 17th and early 18th century, the book outlines what winter was like at that time, and how the residents of New England, both Native and English, experienced it. While it obviously covers a much wider geography than just Boston, Boston does play a part.
Wickman shares stories of violent winter storms where the tides rose so quickly around Boston’s wharves that the ice pack heaved and damaged the piers. There were stories of three Native Americans who died of hypothermia on Boston Neck after getting caught in an unexpected storm. And even the stories that range farther afield tell us more about early New England, and early Boston. Learn how Native Americans used specialized snowshoes to thrive in their winter hunting grounds, and how English settlers later adopted the same technology to send military patrols into those same hunting grounds, disrupting Native food sources.
Upcoming Event
Our friends at Boston By Foot have partnered with both Sam Adams and Democracy Brewing to create Tastings and Tales, a whole series of historically inspired beer tastings. They have one tasting planned with each brewery in the months of January, February, and March. If you’re as bad at math as I am, that’s a total of six tastings. The historical subjects for each event span a wide range. At Sam Adams, you will hear about the early history of beer in Boston in January; then fun historical tales in February, including Faneuil Hall’s golden grasshopper weather vane, the state’s sacred cod, and more; and then finally in March the topic will be the remarkable women of Jamaica Plain.
Over at Democracy Brewing, the first tasting will be structured around the stories that inspired the names of their beers, including James Michael Curley, pullman porters, and labor organizers; February will bring tales of community solidarity; and the topic in March will be radical women like Lucy Stone and Melnea Cass, not too different from what’s happening over at Sam Adams. All the events at Democracy will begin at 2pm on Sundays, while the Sam Adams tastings will be held at 6pm on Mondays. Each tasting will be $20, and they are, obviously, 21+.
Boston's Favorite Fighting Frenchman (episode 163)
Dec 15, 2019
At just 19 years old, Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette joined our American Revolution. Commissioned as a Major General in 1777, he served with distinction as an aggressive combat commander and trusted adviser to George Washington. Nearly a half century later, the aging general would return to his beloved United States for a nationwide tour, and his first and urgent destination after arriving on this continent was Boston. In the summer of 1824, he arrived in our city as the greatest celebrity it had yet seen. He was received by Governor William Eustis, former President John Adams, and Boston mayor Josiah Quincy before launching his national tour. The next spring, he returned, presiding over the dedication of the Bunker Hill monument on the 50th anniversary of the battle.
An article by Christian McBurney in the Journal of the American Revolution gives more context on the 1778 Bread Riot in Boston where a French officer was beaten to death.
City of Boston records with accounts of Lafayette’s 1781 and 1784 visits to Boston, plus planning for 1824.
Lafayette at Bunker Hill by Henry Cheever Pratt
A reproduction of Lafayette’s L’Hermione
Peacefield
Bunker Hill Monument
Boston Book Club
The December 6 issue of the Boston Globe Magazine included a feature called “The Forgotten Story of ‘America’s Most Famous Tool,” by Michael Fitzgerald. When you picture a pipe wrench, the first words you associate with it probably aren’t technological breakthrough at the forefront of high tech innovation, but 150 years ago, that’s what the Stillson Wrench was.
You may have never heard of a Stillson Wrench before, but you’ve certainly seen one. Even if you don’t own a toolbox, you’ve seen them emblazoned on the side of a white van or business card as part of a plumbing business’s logo, or you’ve seen them drawn in the panels of a cartoon either to indicate that a character is a blue collar worker or to be employed as a blunt force weapon by hero or villain. It’s the heavy wrench that consists of one long, often L-shaped piece of steel topped by another L-shaped piece of steel. A thumbscrew allows the one on top to be adjusted up or down to accommodate different sized pipes, and where the insides of the short legs of the L meet, there are teeth to grip the pipe.
In the mid-19th century, Boston was quickly adopting one of the most sophisticated systems of indoor plumbing in the country. As we heard in episode 161, about the deadly 1849 cholera epidemic in Boston, we got a solid fresh water source starting in 1848, but the sewage system lagged years behind. Nevertheless, the quick adoption of a municipal water source meant that Boston was one of the most exciting places to be in the plumbing business. One of the most successful workers in that industry was Daniel Stillson.
Stillson had worked at the Charlestown Navy Yard, then as a machinist in the Navy during the Civil War. By the late 1860s, he was an engineer at the JJ Walworth corporation in Boston, which the Globe Magazine article describes as “the Boston company that brought steam heating systems to the world in the 1840s. It had to create much of what it needed to build these systems, such as valves and fittings and radiators and, 150 years ago, Stillson’s pipe wrench.”
With the proliferation of different size pipes, each with uniquely shaped valves and fasteners, Stillson saw an opportunity to create a single tool that could tackle nearly all the jobs in the steam industry, and by extension in household plumbing. The article continues,
He envisioned a tool made expressly for round metal pipe. Its jaws would have angled teeth facing opposite directions, allowing them to grip more effectively than its predecessors. The head would be loose, which would help it clamp down ever more tightly on a pipe when a worker turned its handle, but also easily release.
Stillson whittled the first prototype of his new pipe wrench out of wood, and brought it into work. His bosses were intrigued, and had him get the company’s workshop to make a steel version of it, then prove it was strong enough to tear a 1 ¼-inch pipe. As the story goes, Stillson, who had a sailor’s penchant for profanity, swore roundly before going off to test the wrench. He came back with the broken pipe and the wrench intact. It worked.
His patent was issued in 1870, and the company let him keep it. The Stillson wrench quickly became one of the best selling tools in history. Before he died in 1899, he had made about $80,000 in royalties, which would translate to about $2.2 million today. Check out the article for more on Stillson and his wrench, the many knockoff wrenches that were soon being manufactured around Boston and around the country, and what happened to Walworth and similar factories that used to dot the Boston landscape.
Upcoming Event
And for our upcoming event this week, we’re taking you to the main branch of On January 14th, the Boston Public Library’s Leventhal Map Center will be presenting a talk titled “Witnesses: Re-reading the cartographies of dispossession.” Here’s what’s in store for you at the talk, according to the library website:
The United States achieved its 19th-century policy of expansionism across the midwestern and western regions of the continent by aggressively enacting policies of dispossession and genocide at the state and federal level against Indigenous people. Maps were both the mechanisms for, and witnesses to, the betrayals of justice that made the violence of dispossession and extermination possible. Margaret Pearce, independent cartographer and Faculty Associate at the University of Maine, asks us to stand in witness, look closely and listen to these stories in support of Indigenous people on whose lands we are guests.
Keep in mind that even though the Leventhal Map Center is sponsoring the event, it will actually be held in the Commonwealth Salon at the Copley branch of the BPL.
Separate but Equal in Boston (episode 162)
Dec 08, 2019
The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ruled on Roberts v Boston 170 years ago this month. When five year old Sarah Roberts was turned away from the schoolhouse door in Boston simply because of the color of her skin, her father sued the city in an attempt to force the public schools to desegregate, in compliance with a state law that had been intended to do just that years before. Unfortunately, the suit was unsuccessful. Not only did the Boston schools remain segregated, but the court’s decision provided the legal framework of “separate but equal,” which would be used to justify segregated schools across the country for a century to come.
Published in 1827, the House Servant’s Directory, by Robert Roberts, is a detailed, indispensable guide for domestic servants, or as the author would have put it, “those entering into gentlemen’s service.” Written over a two year period while he was the head butler at Governor Christopher Gore’s Waltham estate, Roberts’ guide is considered one of the first books written by an African American author for a broad commercial audience. And the audience was truly broad, with three editions of the book selling out. Demand was high, not only among those in gentlemen’s service, but also with the ambitious and newly wealthy families who would employ domestic servants. Here’s how a review from the New England Historical Society describes it:
The job Robert Roberts described amounted to managing an entire household as head butler or steward. He advised the servant to display deference to the employer but to conduct himself with dignity and skill. He advised employers to only hire servants over 30 years old.
Throughout the day, the servant had to help his employer get dressed and keep his clothes in order, make and present drinks, supervise contractors, serve meals, supervise servants, light the fire, maintain the wine cellar and shop for food.
One of the servant’s most important duties was serving meals in a style befitting an aristocratic Bostonian. Historian Graham Russell Hodges notes the House Servant’s Directory served as ‘a precise manual of proper dining room conduct for an aspiring American elite.’
The book gives detailed instructions on serving dinner. Don’t bring the cheese out too early, because it might smell. Make as little noise as possible when changing plates. Make sure the side dishes line up straight on the table. Take a station a yard behind the person at the foot of the table and a little to the left. Never let your thumb be farther than the rim of the plate. Take off dish covers with your left hand. Have half as many candles as guests, with a flame should be 18 inches above the table.
Heating the house occupied a great deal of time in winter, and Roberts devotes 14 pages to making a fire of Lehigh coal, also known as anthracite or Rhode Island coal.
The House Servant’s Directory also includes many recipes, for polishes, cleaners, spot removers, jams, sauces, drinks and adhesives.
After Governor Gore died in 1827, Robert Roberts retired from service and bought a house on Beacon Hill. For the next 30 years, he worked tirelessly for the abolitionist cause and to advance civil rights for black citizens. The cause of integrating Boston’s public schools would be taken up by his granddaughter, Sarah, who was the plaintiff in the case at the heart of this week’s episode.
Shortly after the first Europeans arrived in 17th century New England, they began to enslave the area’s indigenous peoples and import kidnapped Africans. By the eve of the American Revolution, enslaved people comprised only about 4% of the population, but slavery had become instrumental to the region’s economy and had shaped its cultural traditions.
In this concise yet comprehensive history, Jared Ross Hardesty focuses on the individual stories of enslaved people in New England, bringing their experiences to life. He also explores the importance of slavery to the colonization of the region and to agriculture and industry, New England’s deep connections to Caribbean plantation societies, and the significance of emancipation movements in the era of the American Revolution.
While the talk is being put on by the Royall House, it’s actually being held at the Cabot Center at Tufts University, not far from Davis Square. There’s no charge for admission, but space is limited, so advanced registration is encouraged.
Boston in the Time of Cholera (episode 161)
Dec 01, 2019
Cholera is a truly horrifying disease, with severe diarrhea causing death through dehydration, while the patient remains awake and in agony. The disease is carried by fecal bacteria, so it’s virtually unknown in highly developed countries today, because of our sophisticated sewage and drinking water systems. Back in 1849, Boston had just begun to address its drinking water needs, with the Cochituate aqueduct opening the year before. We had not, however, even begun to deal with our sewage. In most of Boston, raw sewage ran in open gutters down the sides of the street. When the first major cholera epidemic hit Boston in the summer of 1849, hundreds died. There were no antibiotics or IV rehydration to treat victims with. Instead, the city government took a public health approach that was focused on sanitation first.
Public Health in the Town of Boston, 1630-1822 is an extensive study of Boston’s battle against epidemic disease in the years between English colonization and incorporation as a city that was published in 1959 by Dr. John Blake. We didn’t even know this book existed until recently, but once we discovered it, we realized we had missed out on an important book. I can’t believe that we released two different episodes about the 1721 smallpox epidemic, not to mention the Spanish flu, without consulting this volume. It’s exhaustively researched, tying Boston’s struggles with smallpox, yellow fever, and dysentery to advances in medicine and broader historical themes.
Here’s how the Harvard University Press describes the book:
In this book, based almost exclusively on original source material, John Blake takes a detailed look at the public health history of the town of Boston. Historically, the author tells us, public health may be viewed as the science and art of preventing disease and promoting health through organized community activity. A significant part of this study is the insight it offers into the early attitudes toward disease and death as well as other basic political, social, and economic questions.
Dr. Blake outlines the development of public health practice from occasional emergency measures to a continuing program for the prevention and control of certain epidemic diseases. The introduction and increasing use of smallpox inoculation and later of vaccination are described and their importance evaluated. The book also discusses the further developments in the 1790s and the following two decades that resulted from a series of yellow-fever epidemics in northern seaports, including the establishment of a board of health and its efforts to prevent recurrence of this disease. The prevention of other endemic infectious diseases, though far more important in their effect on the community’s health, was largely neglected. Nevertheless, the principles of notification, isolation, and quarantine had been established and the need for governmental activity to protect the public health, for special public health officials, and for expenditure of tax money for public health purposes had been recognized.
This study, restricted in time to the period before Boston became a city (1630–1822), deals with the early years of the public health movement, a period that has been largely neglected. In comparing Boston’s experience with that of other colonies and England, Dr. Blake presents the European background in both the theory and practice of epidemiology and public health. The colonies themselves, whose differences caused many contemporaries to despair of their ever becoming a single nation, were yet bound by an essential homogeneity. “By and large they had the same language, the same religion, the same inheritance of British social and political ideals. And by and large they had the same diseases. Thus the history of public health in Boston becomes significant for the whole American experience.”
Upcoming Event
Back in 1773, colonists in Massachusetts were upset with Parliament, and the tax on tea had become a symbol of everything they were upset about. Before the Boston Tea Party became a symbol for far-right anti-government extremists, before the Boston Tea Party even became a tea party, the town of Lexington had its own tea protest. Three days before the destruction of the tea on Boston Harbor, Lexington residents brought their household tea out to the common and burned it in a giant bonfire. They issued a resolution saying that anyone in Lexington who continued to drink tea would be seen “as an enemy of this town and this country.” It also said, “Should the State of Our Affairs require it, We shall be ready to Sacrifice our Estates, and every thing dear in Life, Yea & Life itself, in support of the common Cause.”
Modern Lexington reenacts the tea burning every December. This year’s day-long Lexington Tea Burning will be held on December 8. There will be musket drills, tours of Buckman Tavern, fife and drum music, and the tea will be burned at 1:30pm. Festivities begin at 11am. The event is free and open to the public.
Over the River and Through the Wood (episode 160)
Nov 24, 2019
We know the song “Over the River and Through the Wood” as a Christmas carol, but it was originally titled “The New England Boy’s Song about Thanksgiving Day.” Despite the song’s quaint themes of traditional New England holiday cheer, the woman who wrote it was anything but traditional. Medford native Lydia Maria Child had been a pioneering children’s author, but her increasingly radical positions on abolitionism, women’s rights, and freethinking jeopardized her earning power and helped galvanize a movement. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
We used Jared Ross Hardesty’s Unfreedom: Slavery and Dependence in Eighteenth Century Boston as a source for our discussion of the origins of slavery in early colonial Boston back in episode 74. Alongside Wendy Warren’s New England Bound and Margaret Ellen Newell’s Brethren by Nature, it’s part of a wave of recent scholarship that reexamines the practice of enslaving African Americans in New England. Hardesty’s book in particular looks at chattel slavery in the context of the rigid class hierarchy of Puritan Boston, and he looks at it as the bottom rung of a ladder of unfreedom that also included penal servitude for criminals, hiring out pauper children, and even apprentices and indentured servants. Here’s how the publisher describes the book:
Instead of relying on the traditional dichotomy of slavery and freedom, Hardesty argues we should understand slavery in Boston as part of a continuum of unfreedom. In this context, African slavery existed alongside many other forms of oppression, including Native American slavery, indentured servitude, apprenticeship, and pauper apprenticeship. In this hierarchical and inherently unfree world, enslaved Bostonians were more concerned with their everyday treatment and honor than with emancipation, as they pushed for autonomy, protected their families and communities, and demanded a place in society.
Drawing on exhaustive research in colonial legal records – including wills, court documents, and minutes of governmental bodies – as well as newspapers, church records, and other contemporaneous sources, Hardesty masterfully reconstructs an eighteenth-century Atlantic world of unfreedom that stretched from Europe to Africa to America. By reassessing the lives of enslaved Bostonians as part of a social order structured by ties of dependence, Hardesty not only demonstrates how African slaves were able to decode their new homeland and shape the terms of their enslavement, but also tells the story of how marginalized peoples engrained themselves in the very fabric of colonial American society.
Upcoming Event
You may remember William Monroe Trotter as a central figure in our episode about Black Boston’s opposition to the racist movie Birth of a Nation, when he organized protests, petitioned the state legislature, and eventually met with President Wilson. He was an author, a newspaper publisher, and a founder of the NAACP, but he has been largely forgotten by history, overshadowed by later activists. Dr. Kerri Greenidge’s new biography of Trotter, Black Radical: the Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter, puts him back into the center of the struggle for Black rights in the early 20th century as a radical counterweight to moderate figures like Booker T Washington.
Fannie Farmer's Cookbook (episode 159)
Nov 18, 2019
Just in time for your fantasies about the perfect Thanksgiving meal, we’re going to introduce you to Boston’s matriarch of modern cooking this week. You probably thought that Julia Child was Greater Boston’s original top chef, but a generation before Julia launched her career, Fannie Farmer published a cookbook that revolutionized the way that recipes are presented, made cooking accessible to the average home maker, and put Boston at the center of kitchens across the nation.
As a side note, your humble hosts moved this weekend, so this episode will be on the shorter side, but we hope to be back next week in full force.
An obituary for Fannie Farmer from The New York Times’s “Overlooked No More” series, in which obituaries are written for significant historical figures, often women and People of Color, whose contributions were not recognized at the time of their death.
The podcast Documents that Changed the World covers Farmer’s cookbook.
Boston Book Club
Many of you probably have guests who will be visiting Boston this holiday season. It can be hard to find a walking tour in November and December, but on a mild day it is the perfect season to explore historic Boston. The Complete Guide to Boston’s Freedom Trail by Charles Bahne is our go-to for the Freedom Trail. It provides detailed walking instructions and just the right amount of history and context at each stop. It’s small enough to carry in a coat pocket, and if you order it right away, you can study up to impress your friends and family.
If you embark on the trail, you’ll want to make a few stops along the way to warm up. We recommend Boston Cream Pie at the Omni Parker House, a cup of chowder at the Union Oyster House, and a hearty lunch at the Warren Tavern in Charlestown. All of these sites are uniquely historic with delicious menus.
Upcoming Event
On Monday, December 16, experience one of the best ways to be part of Boston’s revolutionary history. Practice your colonial insults and curses for the annual Boston Tea Party Reenactment hosted by Old South Meeting House and the Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum.
The event website describes the evening:
It’s December 16th, and trouble is brewing in Boston. Join us to travel back in time and relive one of the most iconic public protests in American history– the Boston Tea Party!
First, gather at Old South Meeting House, the actual historic landmark where the colonists met in 1773, with Boston’s infamous rabblerousers like Samuel Adams, Paul Revere– and even some crown-loving Loyalists– to debate the tea tax and demand liberty from the British crown. Then, join the fife and drum led procession to Griffin’s Wharf, and line the shores of Boston Harbor with scores of colonists to “Huzzah!” the Sons of Liberty as they storm the Brig Beaver and toss that troublesome tea into the icy waters below!
The event schedule is as follows:
6:30pm “Meeting of The Body of the People” (TICKET REQUIRED) Ticket holders join an authentic, spirited, and theatrical colonial meeting at Old South Meeting House to protest the colonial tax on tea, just as unprecedented numbers of colonists gathered in this very building 245 years ago. (INSIDE PERFORMANCE REQUIRES TICKET)
6:30pm “Friends! Brethren! Countrymen!” (FREE TO THE PUBLIC)As the town meeting rages inside of Old South Meeting House, join the crowds outside and hear from a Town Crier and the women of Colonial Boston as they discuss news of this tea crisis. (OUTSIDE PERFORMANCE FREE TO THE PUBLIC)
7:30pm “Huzzah for Griffin’s Wharf” (FREE TO THE PUBLIC; TICKET HOLDERS GET PRIME PLACEMENT) Led by fife & drum corps, we’ll parade through the Financial District of Boston and down to the Waterfront where Griffin’s Wharf once stood. We’ll follow same route the original Patriots walked to Boston Harbor to destroy the tea!
8:00pm “Boston Harbor, A Teapot Tonight!” (FREE TO THE PUBLIC; TICKET HOLDERS GET GUARANTEED VIEWING) Stand side-by-side with the colonists as we line the shores of Boston Harbor. We’ll “Huzzah!” as the Sons of Liberty storm aboard the Brig Beaver to destroy chest after chest of East India Company Tea.
Advanced registration is required for the ticketed portion of the event, and tickets cost $30.
Harvard Harnesses the Heavens (episode 158)
Nov 10, 2019
Since we “fell back” to Standard Time this past weekend, Boston has been forced to adjust to 4:30 sunsets. To help us understand why the sun sets so early in Boston in the winter and what we could do about it, we’re going to replay a classic episode about how the idea of time zones and standard time was born in Boston, with the help of the Harvard Observatory. And because we’re talking about the observatory, we have to share the story of the women who worked as human computers at the Harvard Observatory.
A Boston Globeeditorial arguing in favor of joining Atlantic Time
A Hartford Couranteditorial arguing against joining Atlantic Time
The report of the Massachusetts Time Zone Commission
Boston’s first time ball, on the Equitable building
Equitable building exterior
Equitable building exterior
Boston’s second time ball, on the Ames building
An 1879 railroad guide, listing dozens of time zones
An 1896 railroad guide, after standard time zones
My own graphic showing what our move to Atlantic Time could look like
Harvard’s Human Computers
Williamina Fleming
Henrietta Swan Leavitt
Annie Jump Cannon
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin
Harvard computers pose in 1918. Photo courtesy of the Harvard College Observatory.Henrietta Swan Leavitt (r) and Annie Jump Cannon (l) in 1913. Photo courtesy of the Harvard College Observatory.
Hat tip to the Self Rescuing Princess Society blog for first introducing us to Williamina Fleming and the Human Computers.
As long as we’re at it, some praise for the children’s book Rejected Princesses for sharing Annie Jump Cannon with the next generation.
Here’s that book by the Harvard physician who claimed that girls who are “apt to be quick, brilliant, ambitious, and persistent at study … need not stimulation, but repression.”
Annie Jump Cannon in Rejected Princesses
Annie Jump Cannon in a Wonder Woman comic
Boston Book Club
Two years ago, a legislative commission looked at what it would mean if Massachusetts moved to the Atlantic time zone, effectively keeping Daylight Saving Time year round. In the end, their conclusions were fairly optimistic for those of us who hate 4:30 sunsets. They said that Massachusetts residents would likely be happier, healthier, and wealthier than they are now, due to increased economic activity, opportunities for fitness activities, and evening sunlight. However, they stressed that we could only move to Atlantic time if the other New England states came along, as well. Read their report, and then listen to the episode to find out what the other states are up to.
Upcoming Event(s)
David J Silverman of George Washington University will be giving a presentation titled “This Land is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving” in two different Boston events. Here’s how the event is described:
Ahead of the 400th anniversary of the first Thanksgiving, historian David J. Silverman offers a transformative new look at the Plymouth colony’s founding events, told for the first time with the Wampanoag people at the heart of the story, in This Land is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving. Silverman is a professor of Native and Colonial American history at George Washington University and has worked with modern-day Wampanoag people for more than twenty years. Through their stories, other primary sources, and historical analysis, Silverman sheds profound new light on the events that led to the creation, and bloody dissolution, of the alliance between the Wampanoag tribe and the Plymouth settlers. The result complicates and deepens our current narrative of the first Thanksgiving, presenting us with a new narrative of our country’s origins for the twenty-first century.
Girl in Black and White: the Story of Mary Mildred Williams and the Abolition Movement, with Jessie Morgan-Owens (episode 157)
Nov 03, 2019
We’re joined this week by Dr. Jessie Morgan-Owens, who called from New Orleans to discuss her book Girl in Black and White: The Story of Mary Mildred Williams and the Abolition Movement. Mary was born into slavery in Virginia, the child of an enslaved mother and father. Through the remarkable efforts of her father, the entire family was emancipated when Mary was 7 years old. Shortly thereafter, Mary caught the eye of Senator Charles Sumner. Her complexion was light enough for her to pass as white, making her a powerful political symbol for the abolitionist cause. The books details her life and deep ties to the Boston area.
Dr Jessie Morgan-Owens is a professional photographer and dean of Bard Early College in New Orleans. After stumbling across a mention of the famous daguerreotype of Mary Mildred Williams while doing unrelated research in 2006, she spent over 12 years researching Mary’s life and family. The result, Girl in Black and White, attempts to reconstruct the actual life of a little girl who was used by abolitionists for her symbolic value.
If you still need more convincing, here’s how the publisher describes the book:
When a decades-long court battle resulted in her family’s freedom in 1855, seven-year-old Mary Mildred Williams unexpectedly became the face of American slavery. Famous abolitionists Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry David Thoreau, and John Albion Andrew would help Mary and her family in freedom, but Senator Charles Sumner saw a monumental political opportunity. Due to generations of sexual violence, Mary’s skin was so light that she “passed” as white, and this fact would make her the key to his white audience’s sympathy. During his sold-out abolitionist lecture series, Sumner paraded Mary in front of rapt audiences as evidence that slavery was not bounded by race.
Weaving together long-overlooked primary sources and arresting images, including the daguerreotype that turned Mary into the poster child of a movement, Jessie Morgan-Owens investigates tangled generations of sexual enslavement and the fraught politics that led Mary to Sumner. She follows Mary’s story through the lives of her determined mother and grandmother to her own adulthood, parallel to the story of the antislavery movement and the eventual signing of the Emancipation Proclamation.
Girl in Black and White restores Mary to her rightful place in history and uncovers a dramatic narrative of travels along the Underground Railroad, relationships tested by oppression, and the struggles of life after emancipation. The result is an exposé of the thorny racial politics of the abolitionist movement and the pervasive colorism that dictated where white sympathy lay—one that sheds light on a shameful legacy that still affects us profoundly today.
During the episode, we talked with Jessie about an exhibit at Boston’s Museum of African American History that tried to highlight how Frederick Douglass used photography and his own likeness to white opinion about African American Men. While we were there, we bought a book called Picturing Frederick Douglass, which you might want to check out, in order to contrast his experience with that of Mary Williams.
Upcoming Event
For our upcoming event this week, we’re featuring a lecture in the Old North Speaker Series:
Vaccination Controversies Then and Now: Boston in 1721 and 1901. The lecture will be delivered by David Jones, a Professor of the Culture of Medicine at Harvard, and then followed by a community discussion facilitated by Tegan Kehoe, whom we had the pleasure to meet at History Camp. Here’s how they describe the event:
Immunization is one of the oldest and most effective medical technologies now in use. However, immunization has sparked fierce controversy throughout its history and remains controversial today. This talk will explore the public protests in Boston triggered by the inoculation against smallpox in 1721 and by compulsory vaccination against smallpox in 1901. In each case, opponents of the practice justified their resistance with a mix of arguments that spanned medical theory, religious faith, public safety, and individual rights. The controversy that began in Boston in 1901 reached the Supreme Court in 1905; the resultant ruling, Jacobson v. Massachusetts, still governs public health power today. These historical vignettes provide valuable perspective on modern vaccination controversies and suggest possible ways to move forward.
Afterwards, join us for a reception and Community Conversation with the speaker and Tegan Kehoe, Education and Exhibition Specialist for the Museum of Medical History and Innovation at MGH, for an intimate, open-minded discussion of the current vaccination/anti-vaccination debate in our society.
The event will be held at 6:30pm on November 13 at Old North Church. Ticket sales and more information via eventbrite.
The Atlas of Boston History, with Nancy Seasholes (episode 156)
Oct 27, 2019
We’re joined this week by Nancy Seasholes, editor of the new book The Atlas of Boston History, which just came out on Thursday. It’s a historic atlas of Boston that covers the period from the last ice age, right up to the present day. It contains essays contributed by a wide range of well regarded local historians, as well as many written by Seasholes herself. However, what sets this book apart is its beauty. As the name Atlas indicates, it is richly illustrated with maps, charts, diagrams, infographics, historical photos, paintings, and more. It’s a book that I will use as a reference far into the future, and one that any of my fellow Boston history nerds will love.
Nancy Seasholes is a historian and a historical archaeologist. She’s the past author of Walking Tours of Boston’s Made Land and Gaining Ground: a History of Landmaking in Boston, which is a favorite reference for your humble hosts. Since the book has such a heavy emphasis on visual elements, you may want to follow along at the Atlas of Boston History website as you listen to our conversation this week. It includes sample pages from each of the book’s eleven sections, giving you a much better idea of why I’m so enthusiastic about this beautiful book.
Make sure to catch Nancy’s upcoming local appearances:
If you’re still on the fence, here’s how the publisher describes the Atlas:
Few American cities possess a history as long, rich, and fascinating as Boston’s. A site of momentous national political events from the Revolutionary War through the civil rights movement, Boston has also been an influential literary and cultural capital. From ancient glaciers to landmaking schemes and modern infrastructure projects, the city’s terrain has been transformed almost constantly over the centuries. The Atlas of Boston History traces the city’s history and geography from the last ice age to the present with beautifully rendered maps.
Edited by historian Nancy S. Seasholes, this landmark volume captures all aspects of Boston’s past in a series of fifty-seven stunning full-color spreads. Each section features newly created thematic maps that focus on moments and topics in that history. These maps are accompanied by hundreds of historical and contemporary illustrations and explanatory text from historians and other expert contributors. They illuminate a wide range of topics including Boston’s physical and economic development, changing demography, and social and cultural life. In lavishly produced detail, The Atlas of Boston History offers a vivid, refreshing perspective on the development of this iconic American city.
Upcoming Historical Event(s)
Douglas Egerton will give a lunchtime talk at the Boston Athenaeum on November 8, titled “Heirs of an Honored Name: the Decline of the Adams Family and the Rise of Modern America.” Anyone who’s been listening to our show for a while will realize that I’m a big admirer of the Adams family. I often use the letters of John and Abigail Adams as primary sources, we quoted passages from the letters and diaries of John Quincy in our show about early Charles River bridges, and we’ve even outlined how two of John Quincy’s brothers were involved in a riot at Harvard. John Quincy Adams’ son (and John Adams’ grandson) Charles Francis Adams was a respected historian in his own right, whom we’ve quoted in our episode about the epidemics that decimated Boston’s Native American population.
After those three generations, however, Professor Egerton would argue that the Adams family in America entered an irreversible decline, always living in the shadow of its famous past. Here’s how the Athenaeum describes his talk:
John and Abigail Adams founded a famous political family, but they would not witness its calamitous fall from grace. When John Quincy Adams died in 1848, so began the slow decline of the family’s political legacy. In Heirs of an Honored Name, award-winning historian Douglas R. Egerton depicts a family grown famous, wealthy, but also aimless. After the Civil War, Republicans looked to the Adamses to steer their party back to its radical 1850s roots. Instead, Charles Francis Sr. and his children-Charles Francis Jr., John Quincy II, Henry and Clover Adams, and Louisa Adams Kuhn-largely quit the political arena and found refuge in an imagined past of aristocratic preeminence. An absorbing story of brilliant siblings and family strain, Heirs of an Honored Name shows how the burden of impossible expectations shaped the Adamses and, through them, American history.
That talk will begin at noon on Friday, November 8 at the Boston Athenaeum on Beacon Hill. Advanced registration is required, but there’s no additional charge other than admission to the Athenaeum.
And because we recognize that not everyone can find time to attend a lunchtime talk, we also have a bonus event this week. On Thursday, November 7 at 6pm, Old South Meeting House will host an event in honor of the centennial of women’s suffrage, titled “Massachusetts Women at the Forefront of Change.” Here’s how they describe it:
Fredie Kay, Founder and President of Suffrage100MA, will provide an overview of the suffrage movement in American history, with special attention to Massachusetts activists who paved the way for womens suffrage, including African Americans and other marginalized groups.
The City State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power, 1630-1865, with Mark Peterson (episode 155)
Oct 20, 2019
We’re joined this week by Yale history professor Mark Peterson to talk about his new book The City State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power, 1630-1865. In the interview, Professor Peterson will tell us why he believes that, from its settlement a century and a half before the US Constitutional government was founded until the end of the US Civil War, Boston had a political, economic, and social identity completely independent from the rest of what is now the United States. He’ll also tell us surprising stories about money in early Boston, a French-born British army officer who embodied Boston’s relationship with Acadia, and what it meant for Boston to be a slave society where the enslaved people were kept out of sight.
In the vaunted annals of America’s founding, Boston has long been held up as an exemplary “city upon a hill” and the “cradle of liberty” for an independent United States. Wresting this iconic urban center from these misleading, tired clichés, The City-State of Boston highlights Boston’s overlooked past as an autonomous city-state, and in doing so, offers a pathbreaking and brilliant new history of early America. Following Boston’s development over three centuries, Mark Peterson discusses how this self-governing Atlantic trading center began as a refuge from Britain’s Stuart monarchs and how—through its bargain with slavery and ratification of the Constitution—it would tragically lose integrity and autonomy as it became incorporated into the greater United States.
Drawing from vast archives, and featuring unfamiliar figures alongside well-known ones, such as John Winthrop, Cotton Mather, and John Adams, Peterson explores Boston’s origins in sixteenth-century utopian ideals, its founding and expansion into the hinterland of New England, and the growth of its distinctive political economy, with ties to the West Indies and southern Europe. By the 1700s, Boston was at full strength, with wide Atlantic trading circuits and cultural ties, both within and beyond Britain’s empire. After the cataclysmic Revolutionary War, “Bostoners” aimed to negotiate a relationship with the American confederation, but through the next century, the new United States unraveled Boston’s regional reign. The fateful decision to ratify the Constitution undercut its power, as Southern planters and slave owners dominated national politics and corroded the city-state’s vision of a common good for all.
Peeling away the layers of myth surrounding a revered city, The City-State of Boston offers a startlingly fresh understanding of America’s history.
On October 30, the Massachusetts Historical Society will be hosting a Halloween-themed lunchtime talk. The 2015 movie The Witch, sometimes spelled The VVitch, is a favorite of your humble hosts. It takes the beliefs about witchcraft that early Puritans believed were real and treats them literally. The plot follows one deeply observant family, alone on the 17th century Massachusetts frontier, as they begin to wonder whether they have been cursed. Are they falling prey to hysteria, or are the devil’s minions stalking them among the forests and cornfields? Much of the drama centers around teenage daughter Thomasin’s role as an object of shameful desire for her brother and of jealousy for her mother, and the tension is ramped up by the appearance of an increasingly creepy cast of animals, from a rabbit, to a raven, to a goat named Black Phillip.
The VVitch (2015) visualizes historical oppression as an origin for present-day animalization and concordant disenfranchisement of women who operate outside of proscribed social norms. This talk connects MHS’s archives to The VVitch’s depiction of animality as both feminine and evil to demonstrate the legacy of patriarchal puritanism and possibilities for resistance.
The event will be held at noon on Wednesday, October 30. It’s free and open to the public, just bring a brown bag lunch to enjoy during the talk.
And because we know that not everyone can make it to the Back Bay in the middle of a weekday, we have a bonus event week. Next week, author Nancy Seasholes will be joining us on the podcast to discuss her new book The Atlas of Boston History, which is available to preorder now. By the time you hear our interview with her, the book will be out, and this coming Thursday, you can attend her book launch party at the main branch of the Boston Public Library. It’s like a record release party, but hopefully much, much nerdier. Here’s how the BPL website describes it:
Join us on the evening of October 24 to celebrate the launch of a landmark volume, The Atlas of Boston History: Tracing Boston’s Development through Maps. A reception will be held at 5pm at the Newsfeed Café , followed by a 6:30 presentation from the book’s editor, historian Nancy S. Seasholes, in Rabb Hall. The evening will conclude with a book signing by Nancy and other Atlas contributors. Attendance is free, and no RSVPs are required. We hope you will be able to join us.
Race Over Party: Black Politics and Partisanship in Late Nineteenth-Century Boston, with Millington Bergeson-Lockwood (episode 154)
Oct 13, 2019
Historian Millington Bergeson-Lockwood, author of Race Over Party: Black Politics and Partisanship in Late Nineteenth-Century Boston, joins us this week to talk about the evolution of partisanship and political loyalty among Boston’s African American community, from just after the Civil War until the turn of the 20th century. It was a period that at first promised political and economic advancement for African Americans, but ended with the rise of lynching and codified Jim Crow laws. It was also a period that began with near universal support for Lincoln’s Republican party among African Americans, with Frederick Douglass commenting “the Republican party is the ship and all else is the sea.” However, after decades of setbacks and roadblocks on the path of progress, many began to question their support of the GOP, and some tried to forge a new, non-partisan path to Black advancement. Dr. Bergeson-Lockwood will tell us how the movement developed and whether it ultimately achieved its goals.
Dr. Millington Bergeson-Lockwood describes himself as a “historian of race, politics, and the law in United States history.” Though he completed his PhD at the University of Michigan, he became interested in Boston’s complex history of race and politics while living here as an undergraduate. He joined us from Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, to discuss his book Race Over Party: Black Politics and Partisanship in Late Nineteenth-Century Boston.
Here’s how the UNC Press describes the book:
In late nineteenth-century Boston, battles over black party loyalty were fights over the place of African Americans in the post–Civil War nation. In his fresh in-depth study of black partisanship and politics, Millington W. Bergeson-Lockwood demonstrates that party politics became the terrain upon which black Bostonians tested the promise of equality in America’s democracy. Most African Americans remained loyal Republicans, but Race Over Party highlights the actions and aspirations of a cadre of those who argued that the GOP took black votes for granted and offered little meaningful reward for black support. These activists branded themselves “independents,” forging new alliances and advocating support of whichever candidate would support black freedom regardless of party.
By the end of the century, however, it became clear that partisan politics offered little hope for the protection of black rights and lives in the face of white supremacy and racial violence. Even so, Bergeson-Lockwood shows how black Bostonians’ faith in self-reliance, political autonomy, and dedicated organizing inspired future generations of activists who would carry these legacies into the foundation of the twentieth-century civil rights movement.
Upcoming Event
The Partnership of Historic Bostons is a local group focusing on the historical relationship between Boston, Massachusetts and Boston, Lincolnshire. Charter Day is celebrated on September 7, commemorating the day in 1630 when Boston, Dorchester, and Watertown were all officially named. The partnership has a series of lectures and walking tours throughout September and October as part of their celebration, which you can find at .
One of the last events in this year’s series is a talk by Peter Drummey of the Massachusetts Historical Society on October 23 called “PURITANS IN PRINT: Historiography of the Puritans in Literature.” I’ve seen Drummey present a few times at MHS on topics like the relationship between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson or the legacy of Abraham Lincoln in Boston, so this should be an event to look forward to.
Here’s how the Partnership describes this one:
From the 1630’s to the 1930’s, the Puritans were stigmatized and chastised in literature as dour, joyless and oppressing. H.L. Menckin’s epigram, “Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy,” summarizes much of the first 300 years of Puritan historiography. But against the background of the Great War, Depression and Prohibition, the heavens began to open and Puritan society was examined in a new light. In 1930, historian S.E. Morison wrote “My attitude toward seventeenth-century puritanism has passed through scorn and boredom to a warm interest and respect.” How did the literary portrayal of the Puritans change, and how does that change help us understand our national history?
Note that even though Mr Drummey works at the Mass Historical Society, that’s not where the talk is being held. It will be held in the Blue Sky Lounge and Commons at Suffolk Law School at 6pm on Wednesday, October 23. Advanced registration is required. While admission is free, donations are deeply appreciated.
The Snow Hurricane (episode 153)
Oct 06, 2019
Before the Bomb Cyclone, before Superstorm Sandy, a historically severe storm hit Boston in 1804. Meteorologists say that the tropical cyclone would be counted as a category 2 hurricane today, with winds of 96 to 110 miles per hour. It wasn’t just the wind that made 1804 storm so memorable, although the wind was damaging enough, causing problems for industries representing a large sector of the early 19th economy and wrecking buildings that are major Freedom Trail attractions today. What made the storm so memorable was the fact that it was the first known tropical cyclone to carry snow, giving it the enduring nickname, the Snow Hurricane.
Starting in 1965, designers Peter Chermyeff and Tom Geismar designed the visual language of Boston’s transit network from the ground up. Over the next five years, their agency worked out every detail of the new MBTA’s visual identity, from the iconic T logo to the colors of the subway lines to cleaning up and modernizing stations.
They discuss this process in the September 2018 article “How Boston Got Its T.” Here’s an excerpt where they explain a couple of those decisions:
We also wanted to establish the identity of the system and flag it in the streetscape. People had an affinity for the song “Charlie on the MTA” and the name change to “MBTA” was too long. Our core team started thinking about different ways to make something work and eventually came up with simple “T.” It made sense as a name and image that would apply and be understandable at a distance or in conversation. It connects with all the words associated with the service: “transit,” “transportation,” “tunnel,” “tube,” and so on. It made all the sense in the world to go with “T” and have it displayed in a lollipop logo on trains, buildings, and streets.
Tom worked the logo out in great detail. We were unflinching in our recognition that this was not a truly original idea. Stockholm had already had a black “T” in a white circle for the Tunnelbana. It wasn’t necessary for us to be original, just to be right.
The lines themselves lacked identity, so we thought that color coding them would make huge difference. We applied the same process to all four lines. They had been identified by terminus, but most of those names were unclear to non-locals. I remember sitting in my Cambridge office preparing for a meeting with the MBTA in which I would be proposing colored lines. I had markers in front of me and I chose red for the line that went to Harvard since it’s a well-known institution whose main color is crimson. One line went up the North Shore of Boston up to the coastal areas, so it seemed obvious to call that the Blue Line. The line that serves Olmsted’s Emerald Necklace was an obvious choice for green. And then the fourth line ended up being orange for no particular reason beyond color balance. This was 20 years before the Silver Line was added.
That allowed us to give lines understood names. Instead of Harvard-Ashmont—no one visiting Boston knows what Ashmont is—now you have the Red Line. The presence of color reinforces that identity to help people find their way around.
Read the entire interview to learn how Arlington Street served as a model for an upgraded, modern station; how the team created our iconic T system map; or where the designers think their vision was implemented poorly.
A woman named Mariah, who was enslaved in the household of Joshua Lamb of Roxbury, allegedly set fire to the Lamb house and a neighboring house in July of 1681. While she was awaiting trial, a man named Jack who had escaped from his enslavers in Western Mass was also accused of an unrelated arson. The two defendants were tried at the same Court of Assistants in Boston, with Governor Simon Bradstreet presiding, and they were sentenced to death for the capital crime of arson. Samuel Sewall’s diary records that they were both executed on September 22, 1681. According to the sentence of the court, Mariah was burned to death, while Jack was hanged. When Jack was dead, in accordance with the sentence, his body was ”then taken doune & burnt to Ashes in the fire with Mariah.”
Not quite 75 years later, during the administration of Governor William Shirley, a woman named Phillis suffered a similar fate. In July of 1755, a Charlestown resident named John Codman died. After an inquest named arsenic poisoning as the cause of death, suspicion fell on the African Americans who were enslaved by Codman. Under questioning, a man named Mark admitted to leading a conspiracy to poison Codman with arsenic and a substance called black lead. He had acquired the poisons from neighbors who were enslaved by doctors, and then Codman’s enslaved cooks Phoebe and Phillis slipped the materials into his food. At trial, Phoebe turned state’s witness, while Phillis and Mark were convicted of the crime of petty treason: rising up against their legal owners. For her cooperation, Phoebe was shipped to a sugar plantation in the Caribbean, where life for enslaved laborers was brutal and short. Mark was sentenced to be hanged, and Phillis was sentenced to be burned to death. Both sentences were carried out on September 18, 1755.
Our earlier episode focused on the terrible fate of Phillis, barely mentioning Mark. After he was dead, his body was prepared for public display on Charlestown Common. His body would remain there for decades, becoming a well known public landmark. Historian Josiah Bartlett recorded how a surgeon on his way to join a regiment for service in the French and Indian War in 1758 stopped to examine Mark’s body. He wrote in his diary:
There’s no exact record of when Mark’s body was cut down or decomposed, but it remained a landmark when Paul Revere embarked on his famous ride 20 years later. In a 1798 letter to Jeremy Belknap, the minister and founder of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Revere described the beginning of his ride to Lexington: “I set off upon a very good Horse; it was then about 11 o’Clock, & very pleasant. After I had passed Charlestown Neck, & got nearly opposite where Mark was hung in chains, I saw two men on Horse back, under a Tree.”
Mark’s life and death is often seen as a footnote to Paul Revere’s famous ride, and even in our podcast, he was a footnote to the execution of Phillis by fire. The lunchtime talk by independent researcher Catherine Sasanov at MHS on October 16 will attempt to restore his humanity, putting Mark back in the center of his own story. Here’s how the MHS website describes the event:
Mark (1725-1755), a blacksmith, husband, and father, might have slipped from public memory if not for his brutal end: his body gibbeted for decades on Charlestown Common for the poisoning of his enslaver, John Codman. This project, grounded in Mark’s testimony, approaches “legal” and other documents as crime scenes; attention to clues, connections, and seemingly insignificant details unlock important, previously unrecognized aspects of Mark’s world, thwarting their original intent: the enforcement of slavery’s status quo.
The talk is free and open to the public, just pack a lunch to enjoy while Sasanov is speaking.
Women and Witchcraft (episode 152)
Sep 29, 2019
Between 1648 and 1688, four women were executed for witchcraft in Boston and Dorchester. Witchcraft can be loosely defined as the act of invoking evil spirits or consulting, covenanting with, entertaining, employing, feeding, or rewarding any evil spirit. In practice, it often meant the failure to conform. This week, we’re discussing the trials and executions of Margaret Jones, Alice Lake, Ann Hibbins, and Ann Glover, who fell victim to superstition and Puritan morality.
The case of Ann Glover gets used to promote the racist myth of “Irish Slaves“
Boston Book Club
Witch Hunt Podcast host/ creator Nancy Mades-Byrd describes the series as a podcast about the history of scapegoating, and season one details the Salem witch trials.
To get you hooked, episode one asks the question – Why is Salem the witch hunt people remember? It examines the European roots of the Salem witch trials and features renowned author Frances Hill, author of “A Delusion of Satan.” In episode two, historian Dr. Mary Beth Norton discusses what was it about the villagers of Salem that made them the people most likely to unleash a witchcraft Hysteria. The ten episode season weaves together a compelling narratives and includes the reflections of direct descendants of some of the victims.
Upcoming Event
And for our upcoming event this week, we’re featuring a talk at Old South Meeting House that’s presented by the Friends of the Boston Harbor Islands and cosponsored by the group Boston Harbor Now called “Peddocks Island: Rich History, Vital Future.” Peddocks is the second largest of the 34 Boston Harbor Islands. Managed by the state Department of Conservation and Recreation, it is a favorite park for day trips from Boston and family camping, but the island also has a rich history.
There’s archaeological evidence, including the oldest human remains ever found in Massachusetts, that the island was long occupied by Native Americans. It was the site of one of the first interactions between European visitors and the indigenous population, when a French trading ship visited in about 1616. Early English colonist Thomas Morton recalled in his 1637 book A New English Canaan, “upon some distaste given in the Massachusetts bay by the Frenchmen, then trading there with the natives for beaver, they set upon the men at such advantage that they killed many of them, burned their ship, then riding at anchor by an island there, now called Peddocks island.” The survivors were taken as captives, with Morton writing that the victors, “distribut[ed] them unto five sachems, which were lords of the several territories adjoining: they did keep them so long as they lived.”
In more recent history, Peddocks island was home to Fort Andrews, which was designed during the Spanish American War era and played a role in Boston’s harbor defenses during both World Wars. Visitors today can explore the crumbling barracks and the concrete bunkers that use to house cannons so big that they broke windows every time they were fired. They can also visit a cottage community that is the last remnant of Boston’s early 20th century Portuguese-American fishing fleet. Over the years, the island played host to a healthy trade in bootlegging and speakeasies during prohibition, to a venue for Sunday baseball when Boston’s blue laws prevented such frivolity on land, and to an entrepreneurial group from the Passamaquoddy tribe of Maine who came all the way to Boston Harbor to hunt seals for a cash bounty.
Today, Peddocks Island is at a crossroads, and the quiet campground and historic fort where your humble hosts have spent many happy summer weekends are slated for redevelopment. Plans are on the table to bulldoze much of historic Fort Andrews and replace it with a luxury hotel and spa, an outdoor concert venue, and a conference center. With that context, here’s how the event at Old South Meeting House is described:
Peddocks Island, a series of drowned drumlins, is part of the Boston Harbor Islands National and State Park. It’s currently the largest of the 34 Boston Harbor Islands that is open to the public. Home to historic Fort Andrews, walking tours, geological features, and archaeological sites, the island is in the midst of an exciting redevelopment planning process led by Boston Harbor Now with the National Park Service and the Department of Conservation and Recreation. Cheri Ruane of Weston & Sampson Design Studio, lead consultant for the island’s development plan, and Alice Brown of Boston Harbor Now, will discuss fascinating highlights of the island’s past, present, and future.
The event will be held at 6:30pm on Thursday, October 10. It’s free and open to the public, but advanced registration is required. If you plan to attend, please listen with a skeptical ear for any whitewashing of a plan to convert one of Boston’s last great wild spaces to a luxury retreat open only to the elite.
The Birth of Historic Preservation in Boston (episode 151)
Sep 22, 2019
From the mid-19th century through the nation’s centennial in 1876, some of Boston’s most important historic sites and attractions were destroyed or nearly so. Starting with the Beacon Hill home of founding father John Hancock in 1863, and going right through the 20th century, Old South Meetinghouse, the Old State House, the Old Corner Bookstore, and many other buildings that help lend Boston its unique character, were threatened with demolition in the name of progress. After early losses, Boston was faced with the prospect of midwestern cities like Chicago or St Louis buying up and moving iconic buildings in order to save them from the wrecking ball. Through this threat, Bostonians learned to value their cultural heritage and banded together to protect early historic sites, especially those connected to the Revolutionary War that were of importance to all Americans.
While our main story this week is going to focus on the manmade landscape of Boston, highlighting what has changed and what we believe to be worth saving, Remaking Boston: An Environmental History of the City and Its Surroundings takes a similar approach to the natural landscape. It’s divided into sections about the harbor, town and countryside, and the climate. This is a go-to source when I’m researching episodes like the story of the 17th century canal called the Mother Brook or how the need for improved sewers helped inspire Boston’s history of annexations. It is peppered through with illustrations, including maps, diagrams, and historic photos. In one effective sequence, the effect of climate change is illustrated by printing a series of photos showing natural processes: azaleas blossoming in the Arboretum, Lady Slippers blooming in the Stony Brook, or apples ripening for harvest. By printing a dated historic photo next to a dated modern photo of the same process, the authors create a vivid picture of our warming seasons, with lady slippers that used to bloom at the end of June now peaking in mid-May and apples that we used to pick in August now ripening in October.
Here’s an excerpt from the publisher’s description:
Situated on an isthmus, and blessed with a natural deepwater harbor and ocean access, Boston became an important early trade hub with Europe and the world. As its population and economy grew, developers extended the city’s shoreline into the surrounding tidal mudflats to create more useable land. Further expansion of the city was achieved through the annexation of surrounding communities, and the burgeoning population and economy spread to outlying areas. The interconnection of city and suburb opened the floodgates to increased commerce, services, and workforces, while also leaving a wake of roads, rails, bridges, buildings, deforestation, and pollution.
Profiling this ever-changing environment, the contributors tackle a variety of topics, including: the glacial formation of the region; physical characteristics and composition of the land and harbor; dredging, sea walling, flattening, and landfill operations in the reshaping of the Shawmut Peninsula; the longstanding controversy over the link between landfills and shoaling in shipping channels; population movements between the city and suburbs and their environmental implications; interdependence of the city and its suburbs; preservation and reclamation of the Charles River; suburban deforestation and later reforestation as byproducts of changing land use; the planned outlay of parks and parkways; and historic climate changes and the human and biological adaptations to them.
If you’re curious about the effect that both manmade and natural processes have had on the natural world underlying the city of Boston, check out Remaking Boston.
Upcoming Event
And since this week’s episode is all about the early days of historic preservation, our upcoming event will highlight present day efforts through the 2019 Preservation Achievement Awards.
The Boston Preservation Alliance works to ensure that our history carries on into our future. The BPA, a nonprofit organization, brings people and organizations together to influence the future of Boston’s historic buildings, landscapes, and communities. Through advocacy and education, the BPA attempts to create thoughtful change that protects the historic character that defines our city – important work in a city where 17th century structures are nestled into modern neighborhoods, and our modern architecture often lacks character.
The 31st annual Preservation Achievement Awards will be held on Monday, October 21, 2019, at the Revere Hotel, 200 Stuart Street, Boston. The event celebrates the BPAs mission of Protecting Places, Promoting Vibrancy, and Preserving Character.
Tickets are $150 through October 1, and $65 for young professionals under $40. Doors open at 5:30 pm and the evening will begin with food and drinks. Opening remarks begin at 6:00 pm and the party will continue after the Awards are bestowed—stay to mingle, network, and congratulate the honorees.
Among the awards that are annually presented are the Preservation Acheivmemt Awards, described as:
Neighborhoods are living things. They evolve to the changing needs of their inhabitants. Rural farms become streetcar suburbs. Carriage lanes become roads. Thriving businesses fade. The buildings and places that survive these changes become natural points of reference for the neighborhood and vessels of collective memory. They are physical touchpoints for residents today and tomorrow.
This year’s cohort of award winners shows that historic buildings and parks can adapt to the changing neighborhood around them. Historic structures add a splash of uniqueness to a contemporary brand. As the historic structures blossom with new life, they add an extra layer to the collective memory of the neighborhood.
Sometimes the best way to adapt is to restore and preserve, but with a focus on 21st-century needs. Our award winners illustrate that buildings designed for the needs of people from past centuries can be renewed to fit the needs of a contemporary world. When buildings are designed for people, they can continue to be used by people.
The 2019 PRESERVATION ACHIEVEMENT AWARD WINNERS are:
240A Newbury Street
2101 Washington Street
Boston University Dahod Family Alumni Center
Boston Volvo
Fowler Clark Epstein Farm
Longfellow Bridge
Senate Chambers
Congratulations to this year’s winners!
Women’s Groups Remaking Boston (episode 150)
Sep 15, 2019
This week’s show dusts off two classic stories about times in Boston history when women’s volunteer organizations had a big impact on Boston. First, we’ll talk about the Massachusetts Emergency and Hygiene Association, whose members introduced the concept of a playground to the American public in late 19th century Boston. Then, we’ll fast forward a few decades to the 19 – teens, when the Women’ Municipal League sponsored Boston’s first (and so far only ) Rat Day. Both of these projects made valuable contributions to Boston’s quality of life, and they happened at a time when society didn’t generally approve of women’s work outside the home.
Boston’s Rock n Roll Riots (episode 149)
Sep 08, 2019
Boston has never needed much of an excuse to riot. Over almost four centuries, we’ve had political riots, racist and xenophobic riots, and plenty riots that seem to be about nothing at all. Of all the things Bostonians could choose to riot over, a rock and roll show might just be the most frivolous of all. And yet Boston, like many other cities, has a rich history of riots and near-riots at rock concerts. If you take enough excited young people and pack them into a tight enough space, with with enough hormones (and quite possibly booze or drugs) coursing through their veins, it doesn’t take much of a spark to set off the powderkeg. From Chuck Berry to Led Zeppelin, and from the Rolling Stones to Green Day, we’re looking into the causes and consequences of some of the most iconic melees in Boston’s rock and roll history.
Special thanks this week to Al Quint, editor of the punk zine Suburban Voice, who went into his personal archives and sent me a copy of his review of The Trouble’s last show in 1999. Thanks also to Joe Harris for emailing me his memories of the Green Day riot from the perspective of “a fourteen year old sophomore with broken glasses.”
Thanks to Al Quint for the scans from his coverage of The Trouble’s last show in Suburban Voice.
Boston Book Club
Like we’ve said on the show many times in the past, Boston has never needed much of an excuse to riot, from bread riots during the Revolutionary War to the 20th century rock riots we discussed on the show this week. Published in 2001, Boston Riots: Three Centuries of Social Violence, by Jack Tager describes some of the same incidents we’ve covered on the podcast, including 18th century Pope’s Night riots, the 1747 impressment riot, the 1834 Ursuline convent riot, the 1837 Broad Street riot, the 1919 Boston Police strike, the 1967 Grove Hall riot, and more.
The difference is that where our podcast tends to treat each of these incidents as an event unto itself, a standalone story to tell, Tager traces a few common themes that tie many of Boston’s riots together. Among the themes he identifies is the attempt to enforce or rebel against racial and societal norms in antebellum Boston, anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant sentiments in the mid and late 19th century, what Tager refers to as “ghetto” riots, and waves of antibusing sentiments. He tries to find the links between, for example, the rise of James Michael Curley’s Irish-American Democratic party machine and the Boston Police strike riots, which he in turn connects to the widespread bias against Irish immigrants at the time of Boston’s draft riots a generation or two earlier.
When he talks about the causes of violence in Roxbury in 1967 and 1968 and the white blowback against busing in the 1970s and 1980s, the language Tager uses to talk about race and gender seems dated in 2019. His attempt to uncover and connect the roots of Boston’s longstanding tendency to riot is nevertheless worth reading. I usually include a promotional blurb from the publisher describing the book, but instead here’s an angry one-star review of Boston Riots from Amazon:
Boston Riots is historically inaccurate. Professor Tager seems to think that a scuffle, fist fight, shoving match, or chanting constitutes a riot. In his book, BOSTON RIOTS, Prof. Tager is guilty of semantic manipulation as he redefines the word ‘riot’ to fit his politically correct neo-Marxist interpretation of Boston history. For example, I was personally involved in a few of the anti-forced busing demonstrations mentioned in ‘Boston Riots’ yet no riot of any kind broke out. Professor Tager writes myopically being unaffected and far away from his subject matter. He strangely omits the fact that some of the scuffles which broke out in front of my high school, South Boston High, were instigated by the Tactical Police Force (T.P.F.). It is a singular point in history that Boston has never had a riot.
Seems to have touched a nerve, eh? Somebody who personally participated in the violent protests against court ordered busing (we don’t know which ones, but many involved assaults on black schoolchildren) thinks that Tager is a neo-Marxist? And he concludes that Boston, which can be objectively shown to be one of the most riotous cities in American history, has never had a riot? If this guy hates it, you know the book must be worth reading!
Upcoming Event
The Royall House and Slave Quarters in Medford is a terrific historic site that we once featured back when we had a featured site every week. Though Massachusetts is proud of our abolitionist history, we often forget that before that sentiment arose, Massachusetts practiced slavery for about 150 years. The Royall House is the only local site I’ve been to, and perhaps the only site connected to slavery that I’ve been to anywhere, that puts the primary focus of your visit on the enslaved, rather than the enslavers.
Giving Voice is their annual benefit, where they raise a significant portion of their annual budget, as well as building community and showing off the work they do as an organization. This year’s Giving Voice will be held on September 15 at 2pm. It’s being billed as “An Afternoon with Historian Tiya Miles.” You’ll enjoy refreshments on the museum lawn, get a tour of the house, and enjoy remarks by their featured speaker. Here’s how they describe her:
Tiya Miles is a Professor of History and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at Harvard University. Recipient of a 2011 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, Professor Miles is the author of five books of history and one novel. Her most recent work, The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits, was co-winner of the prestigious 2018 Frederick Douglass Book Prize, among many other honors.
She writes, “Historians of the United States are continually unearthing an ugly truth: American slavery had no bounds. It penetrated every corner of this country, materially, economically, and ideologically, and the unjust campaign to preserve it is embedded in our built environments, North and South, East and West.”
As a fundraiser, tickets for the event range from $25 to $50. Register and purchase your tickets on the event page.
Mayor Curley’s Plan to Ban the Klan (episode 148)
Sep 01, 2019
In the early 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan expanded into New England and tried to make Boston a capital of their invisible empire. However, their deep hatred for Catholics and Jews, as well as their promotion of “100% Americanism,” made the KKK a hard sell in an area where the population was growing rapidly, with a constant stream of Jewish and Catholic immigrants. After staying on the sidelines at first, Boston’s colorful mayor James Michael Curley made it his mission to drive the KKK out of Boston. After a few highly publicized Klan rallies in and around Boston, Curley began to fight them with rhetoric and questionably legal manipulation of the city permitting process.
Mayor Curley’s January 1923 open letter declaring war on the KKK in Boston (includes other city documents regarding Curley and the KKK. Thanks to Marta Crilly at the Boston City Archives for finding all these materials and sending them along).
View a KKK flyer that may have been handed out at Curley’s campaign rally.
Boston Book Club
Our pick for the Boston Book Club this week hasn’t actually been published yet. Black Radical: the Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter is now available for pre-order, with an expected publication date of November 19. I’m taking the unusual step of recommending a pre-publication book because I’m just so darn excited for this one. My twitter friend Rayshauna Gray tweeted about it last week, which is how I learned that Kerri Greenidge had written a new biography of William Monroe Trotter, who was one of the most under-sung Black activists of the early 20th century. He made his name at the turn of the century as the radical response to Booker T Washington’s racial moderation. He published the weekly newspaper The Guardian, giving him a platform to, among other things, lead Boston’s protests against the movie Birth of a Nation, as we heard back in episode 121.
The author of the new bio, Dr. Greenidge, is a student of African American political history and radical Black political consciousness. She was a longtime historian at the Boston African American National Historic SIte, and now she teaches in Tufts University’s Consortium of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora, where she is director of the program in American studies, and where she is also codirector of the African American Trail Project.
Here’s how the Amazon pre-order page describes the book:
This long-overdue biography reestablishes William Monroe Trotter’s essential place next to Douglass, Du Bois, and King in the pantheon of American civil rights heroes. William Monroe Trotter, though still virtually unknown to the wider public, was an unlikely American hero. With the stylistic verve of a newspaperman and the unwavering fearlessness of an emancipator, he galvanized black working- class citizens to wield their political power despite the violent racism of post- Reconstruction America. For more than thirty years, the Harvard-educated Trotter edited and published the Guardian, a weekly Boston newspaper that was read across the nation. Defining himself against the gradualist politics of Booker T. Washington and the elitism of W. E. B. Du Bois, Trotter advocated for a radical vision of black liberation that prefigured leaders such as Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. Synthesizing years of archival research, historian Kerri Greenidge renders the drama of turn- of- the- century America and reclaims Trotter as a seminal figure, whose prophetic, yet ultimately tragic, life offers a link between the vision of Frederick Douglass and black radicalism in the modern era.
In case you can’t tell, I’m really looking forward to this one.
Upcoming Event
On September 7, the Museum of African American History will be hosting a panel discussion called Legacies of 1619: Recognition & Resilience. You’ve probably heard the kerfluffle surrounding the 1619 project, a special edition of the New York Times Magazine timed to coincide with the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in Virginia in 1619. The articles and related projects are intended to emphasize how central slavery is to the history of the United States.
The panel will feature David Krugler of the University of Wisconsin, Peter Wirzbicki from Princeton, and our aforementioned author, Kerri Greenidge of Tufts. It will be moderated by Robert Bellinger of Suffolk University. Here’s how the event website describes it:
The institution of slavery in English North America began in 1619 with the arrival of roughly 20 Africans in the settlement of Jamestown. What has followed has been 400 years of exploitation and discrimination in many different forms. However, telling this story is not complete without an exploration of how African American communities have created culture and institutions that have survived despite these challenges. This program will explore both structures of exploitation and forms of resistance.
The talk is a joint production of the Museum of African American History, Roxbury Community College, and the Mass Historical Society. It will be held on Saturday, September 7 at 4pm, with a reception beginning at 3:30. The event is free, but advanced registration is required.
The Dread Pirate Rachel (episode 147)
Aug 25, 2019
History records that Rachel Wall was the last woman to be hanged in Massachusetts, and legend remembers her as the only woman pirate from Boston. Her highly publicized trial took place as America implemented its new constitutional government. The state attorney general who prosecuted her had been a signer of the Declaration of Independence. A few weeks after the trial, the presiding judge became one of the first US Supreme Court justices, and her defense attorney, who had helped ratify the constitution, soon became the first US Attorney for Massachusetts under the constitution. Not only that, but her death warrant carried perhaps the most famous signature in US history, that of governor John Hancock. On this week’s episode, we uncover the fascinating true story of Rachel Wall’s life, trial, and death that’s hiding within the legend.
Big thanks to our sponsor Liberty & Co. You can save 20% on their entire line of Revolutionary War inspired products when you use discount code HUBHISTORY at checkout.
Memories of Childhood’s Slavery Days is a slim volume of memoir by Annie L Burton, published in 1909. It has an opening passage that can be off-putting for the modern reader, recalling “happy, carefree childhood days on the plantation.” However, the book isn’t the whitewashing that the first sentence indicates. Burton was enslaved on a plantation in Alabama, and her earliest memories were formed during the Civil War years. While she says that the whites were too preoccupied with the war to pay much mind to her and her playmates, Burton recalls whippings given for stealing enough food to last until the next ration day, wives being sold down the river when they didn’t produce a child within a year of their wedding day, and lynchings in the town square.
The arc of Burton’s life after the war brought her to the Boston area multiple times, and gives insight into a time of transition for formerly enslaved people in both the South and the North. In 1879, she was visiting Memphis, and she happened to read a help wanted ad placed by a white Newton family in need of a cook. She answered the ad, got hired, and on June 15, 1879 she stepped off a train in Boston’s Old Colony Station before making her way to the family’s home in Newtonville. As we’ll hear in a few minutes, the Dread Pirate Rachel Wall also spent time as a domestic servant in the Boston area, so it’s interesting to contrast their experiences, which took place about a century apart.
Burton spent about five years working in the households of the Boston area’s wealthy white residents, moving to Roxbury, Jamaica Plain, and eventually Wellesley. A death in the family took her back to the South, and after that she moved to Jacksonville, Florida for a while, where she opened a restaurant and claims to have introduced Boston Baked Beans to the Southern palate. Eventually, she found her way back to Boston and opened a restaurant here, which she says was right across from the Providence depot. The book ends abruptly in 1909, as she was getting ready to publish, when she describes opening a lodging house with her husband, but losing money on it.
It’s an amazing account by an author who remembered the experience of being enslaved, took a chance by migrating to the North, and eventually thrived as an entrepreneur in our city. The book is available as a free download on the internet archive.
Upcoming Event
On September 11, Lori Rogers-Stokes will be giving a talk called Who Were The Puritans, Who Did They Become, and What Do They Mean To Us Today? Your humble hosts have attended lectures by Dr. Rogers-Stokes about Puritan views on sex and marriage, debunking myths about the Puritans, and how the public statements of faith Puritan women made when they officially joined the church reveal their complex inner lives. We can’t think of a better local speaker to explain who the Puritans were.
The talk is part of the annual Charter Day celebration by the Partnership of Historic Bostons. The Partnership is a local group focusing on the historical relationship between Boston, Massachusetts and Boston, Lincolnshire. Charter Day is celebrated on September 7, commemorating the day in 1630 when Boston, Dorchester, and Watertown were all officially named. The partnership has a series of lectures and walking tours throughout September and October as part of their celebration. Here’s how they describe this one:
The Puritans were, in their own day, nothing—a small group with no political power, easily driven from their own land into an America dominated by other powers, both Native and European. Yet they became a lightning rod for later generations, representing all that is good and bad in the American story. We will trace who the Puritans were when they arrived here, who they became, and what they left for following generations. What did the Puritans want New England to be? What ideas did they bring with them, and what ideas did they develop as a result of their experiences here?
The talk will be held in the Rabb lecture hall at the Copley branch of the Boston Public Library. It will begin at 6pm on Wednesday, September 11. There’s no admission fee, but they do require advanced registration, and you have to have a library card.
No other answer but from the mouth of his cannon (episode 146)
Aug 18, 2019
Boston and Quebec City share a deeply intertwined history that goes back to the earliest days of English settlement in North America. Puritan Boston could hardly stand the idea that their closest European neighbor was a Catholic colony, and they made many attempts to drive the hated French from the continent. To defeat the French, the New Englanders would have to take fortresses at Louisbourg, Quebec, and Montreal. We recently talked about the 1745 siege of Louisbourg, but this week we’re going even further back in time. In 1690, Sir William Phips, the frontier shepherd who found a sunken treasure and became a knight, led a large fleet of ships and over 2000 soldiers out of Boston. Their goal was to reduce the defenses of Quebec and force the French colonists to submit to the British crown, but the result was a total disaster.
Support us: http://patreon.com/HUBhistory
Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/146
Boston’s Dark Days and Eclipses (episode 145)
Aug 11, 2019
The brilliant sunsets and dramatic weather reports inspired by smoke drifting into our area from Canadian wildfires last month got me thinking about two past HUB History shows. There have been at least three smoke events in Boston history that caused darkness in the middle of the day and made people wonder if the end of the world was coming. Our first clip will be about the dark days in 1780, 1881, and in 1950. Of course, people who witnessed dark days compared them to solar eclipses. Our second classic segment is from the summer of 2017, exploring the solar eclipses that early Boston witnessed, from soon after European colonization to the turn of the 19th century.
Our pick for the Boston Book Club this week is a satirical map of Boston, which was created by Daniel Wallingford and published in the 1930s. It’s titled “A Bostonian’s Idea of the United States of America,” and if you’ve ever seen the famous New Yorker cover presenting “a view of the united states from 9th avenue,” you’re familiar with the genre. It pokes a bit of gentle fun at our provincialism and self-regard.
On this map of the United States, New England is as big as the rest of the country combined. The distance from Boston to Provincetown is represented as roughly equal to the distance from Boston to Saint Louis. An inset map of Boston and the wider New England area are rendered in faithful detail, while the rest of the country suffers from a hilarious level of carelessness or ignorance. Washington DC is portrayed as being basically right next to Pittsburgh, which is in turn right next to Wyoming. On the West Coast, Omaha and Denver are right between Portland and San Francisco.
Of course, since it purports to represent the Boston mindset, the whole thing is topped by a representation of a codfish. There’s a disclaimer warning readers not to use the map for navigation, astronomy, or meteorology. A note discusses what it means to be a Bostonian:
A person born in the city of BOSTON and residing in BOSTON may not be a BOSTONIAN; yet a person born in Hingham, residing in Newton (dilatory domicile: Magnolia, frequent crossings to England and the Continent), is likely to be a BOSTONIAN. The lack of a definite text-book definition for A BOSTONIAN has added to the many difficulties encountered by the Publishers of this map.
The ideas held by many BOSTONIANS concerning The UNITED STATES have been gathered, evaluated, weighted, and combined. This map, a composite of these ideas, is the result.
Hat tip to the the map-obsessed blog Bostonography, where I first learned about the Wallingford map in a 2011 article.
Upcoming Event
In 1761, slave traders kidnapped a young girl who was about seven years old from West Africa, perhaps from today’s Gambia or Senegal. She was put on the ship Phillis and brought to Boston, where she was purchased and enslaved by a man named John Wheatley, for his wife Susannah. The girl was named Phillis Wheatley after the ship that carried her and the family that enslaved her.
The Wheatley family soon recognized Phillis’ towering intellect, and provided her with an education that few enslaved people, even in “enlightened” New England, could have hoped for. She learned to read and write English quickly, then took up Latin and Greek, soon reading the classics in their original forms. She began writing poetry, and researchers have turned up evidence that she was published as early as 1767. Today, she’s remembered as the first African American to publish a volume of verse, and the first woman to do so in America. That would come later, in 1773, and still later, she would be manumitted.
However, a decade after her arrival in Boston, while she was gaining fame and respect as a poet, but was still enslaved, Phillis Wheatley became a full member of Old South Church on August 18, 1771. Now, this date is celebrated, if celebrated is the right word, as Phillis Wheatley Day at Old South Meetinghouse. The event is free with museum admission, and it will go from 9:30am to 5pm on Sunday, August 18. Stop by to meet a costumed reenactor portraying Wheatley and learn more about her remarkable life.
Aeroplane Fever (episode 144)
Aug 04, 2019
Sky Jockeys, Knights of the Air, and Man-Birds were just a few of the terms that newspapers around the country used to describe the early aviators who converged on Boston in September 1910. The first Harvard-Boston Aero Meet was the largest and most exciting air show that the world had ever seen, and it left Boston gripped by a bad case of aeroplane fever. Famous pilots from the US and around the world, including even Wilbur Wright, would compete for cash prizes in a number of categories, including a high-stakes race to Boston Light in the outer harbor. Tens of thousands of spectators gawked at the spectacle, reporters provided breathless coverage, and the military watched carefully to see if these newfangled flying machines could ever be useful in warfare. The event was so successful that the organizers extended it by three days beyond what was originally scheduled, then followup meets were scheduled for the next two years.
Honey Fitz flies with Claude Grahame-White
Honey Fitz
Honey Fitz, Grahame White, and President Taft
Cromwell Dixon’s dirigible
View of Squantum
Second Boston Light course
Third Boston Light course
Final Boston Light course
Grahame-White’s monoplane
Grahame-White clinches the Boston Light prize
bomb dropping target
Boston Light cigar ad
Transit options to the airfield
Poster
poster
The triplane that crashed
Wilbur Wright sold postcards that he carried on flights
A few months ago, we featured the book The Race Underground, by Doug Most. It details the race between Boston and New York to build the nation’s first subway system. We just discovered the PBS American Experience documentary based on the book, which was released in 2017, which is described as follows:
In the late 19th century, as America’s teeming cities grew increasingly congested, the time had come to replace the nostalgic horse-drawn trolleys with a faster, cleaner, safer, and more efficient form of transportation. Ultimately, it was Boston — a city of so many firsts — that overcame a litany of engineering challenges, the greed-driven interests of businessmen, and the great fears of its citizenry to construct America’s first subway. Based in part on Doug Most’s acclaimed book of the same name, The Race Underground tells the dramatic story of an invention that changed the lives of millions.
Love it or hate it, the T is intrinsic to the Boston experience. To give context for the film, PBS offers several interesting articles and features on related subject matter, including Benjamin M. Schmidt’s article “What the Maps Miss,” which examines how subway maps have led city dwellers to develop mental maps that are very different from geography, and it includes an overlay of a distorted T map on Google maps to illustrate his points.
The film can be viewed on Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, and the film and supporting material are available on PBS.
Upcoming Event
As you know by now, Increase and Cotton Mather cast a long shadow over the early history of Boston. Through his prolific writing, Cotton is a source for researching the religion, history, and even science of the Bay colony in the 17th and 18th centuries. On August 9, a lunchtime talk at Massachusetts Historical Society will focus on one of Cotton’s most influential religious writings, and it will be led by Dr. Jan Stievermann, who’s a professor of the history of American Christianity at Heidelberg University in Germany.
With the ongoing edition of Cotton Mather’s massive Biblia Americana scholars of early America are now gaining access to the first comprehensive Bible commentary produced in the colonies. This talk will give an introduction to the riches of the Biblia as a source for the study of colonial New England and its place in early-modern intellectual history.
The event begins at noon on Friday. It’s free and open to the public, and pack a lunch to enjoy while Dr. Stievermann is giving his talk.
The Secret Tunnels of Boston’s North End (episode 143)
Jul 28, 2019
If you’ve ever taken a walking tour of Boston’s North End, or if you’ve talked to the old timers in the neighborhood, you’ve probably heard stories about the network of so-called secret pirate tunnels or smugglers’ tunnels that connects the wharves to the basements of houses, Old North Church, and even crypts in Copp’s Hill burying ground. Sometimes the tunnels are attributed to a Captain Gruchy, who’s often called a pirate or a smuggler, and who is portrayed as a shadowy figure. It doesn’t take much research to debunk this version of the story, and yet there is historical evidence for tunnels under the streets of the North End. This week, we’ll take a look at that evidence and try to separate fact from fiction.
On the 1722 Bonner map of Boston, the location of the tunnel can be found near the right margin. Locate “Cap Greenough’s Ship Y,” and follow the route of the tunnel from there, past the corner of Lynn and Henchman, and angling over to the tip of Salem.
A view of the tunnel entrance fro Porter’s 1887 book
Illustration of the tunnel in the Sept 6, 1896 Globe
Illustration of the tunnel in the Sept 6, 1896 Globe
A view of the tunnel entrance from the Sept 23, 1906 Globe, adapted from the illustration in Porter
1930 photo of the arch under Salem Street by Leon Abdalian, via Digital Commonwealth
Boston Book Club
Back when we were tour guides, we picked up a slim volume of North End history that co-host Nikki used in putting together our tour of the North End. The book is called The North End, a Brief History of Boston’s Oldest Neighborhood, by Alex R Goldfeld. Goldfeld is also a Boston tour guide, which probably helps explain why his perspective was so helpful in researching a tour. Here’s how the publisher describes it:
Before evolving into a thriving “Little Italy,” Boston’s North End saw a tangled parade of military, religious and cultural change. Home to prominent historical figures such as Paul Revere, this neighborhood also played host to Samuel Adams and the North End Caucus–which masterminded the infamous Boston Tea Party–as well as the city’s first African-American church. From the Boston Massacre to Revere’s heroic ride, the North End embodies almost four centuries of strife and celebration, international influence and true American spirit. A small but storied stretch of land, the North End remains the oldest neighborhood in one of the country’s most historic cities.
Upcoming Event
To continue the tour guide theme, our featured event is a walking tour of Boston’s women’s history from author Jen Deaderick. Deaderick is the author of the new graphic work called She The People, which we know has been in the works for many years, because she discussed the challenging research process at History Camp Boston back in 2015. Now, the book, subtitled “a graphic history of uprisings, breakdowns, setbacks, revolts, and enduring hope on the unfinished road to women’s equality,” is out. The She the People walking tour brings that history home to Boston. Here’s how the author describes it:
With stops at places referred to in my book, SHE THE PEOPLE, or related to people I discuss, this walking tour gives a sense of the layers of women’s history in Boston, from before 1776 to now. We start at the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence in Boston and end with one of our great contributions to 2018’s woman-led Blue Wave.
This week, our show brings you the story of what might be the only example of someone “going postal” in the air. We’re discussing a bizarre 1989 incident involving a North Shore man, a veteran and postal worker. Alfred J Hunter III had always wanted to be a pilot, and thirty years ago this summer, he got the chance. He murdered his ex-wife, stole a plane at gunpoint, and then flew around shooting up the city of Boston with an assault rifle.
By 1981, Hunter’s father owed over $40,000 in back taxes
Our featured image is a fanciful imagination of the strafing from an issue of Yankee Magazine that I’ve never actually gotten my hands on.
Boston Book Club
Since this week’s story of the Cessna Strafer is set in the 80s, it made sense to choose a book club selection from the 80s, as well. Boston Venue: The Channel Story is a new podcast about one of Boston’s premier rock venues of the decade, opening in 1980 and finally shutting down in 1993. The Boston Venue podcast is assembled around the memories of Harry Booras, who founded the Channel, built its reputation, and was eventually forced out of the organization in a mob takeover in 1991. As of this writing, the fourth episode was just released, and already there have been stories of corrupt cops, Southie extortionists, and pay-to-play, not to mention some of the biggest names in punk, hip hop, and reggae. Here’s how the team behind Boston Venue describes their show, and how you can contribute to their narrative:
This podcast tells the true and complete story of the Channel nightclub in Boston, bringing the truth to light! Based on a book in progress containing the vivid recollections of club founder Harry Booras, they cover the too-true-to-believe tale from the club’s beginning in 1980 to its inglorious end at the hands of Boston’s most ruthless mobsters. Over the years, there’s been a lot of rewriting of the club’s history. Harry led the operation of the club for eleven and a half of its twelve years of existence. It’s time to set the record straight once and for all.
This podcast is Harry’s story…but it is also YOUR story!
If you were there — as a performer, audience member, employee, roadie, tech or media member, please share your memories, impressions, and observations. We’re looking for the ones most representative of the true Channel experience to include in the narrative.
All comments are welcome.
Subscribe to Boston Venue in your favorite podcast app, or check out their website.
Upcoming Event
While we take trade with China for granted today, except when our president is trying to start a trade war with them, things weren’t always this easy. Boston’s connections to China began in the early 19th century, then flourished as Boston merchants made fortunes in trade in the middle of the century. As you might remember from our interview with Steven Ujifusa about his book Barons of the Sea, the China trade even inspired Donald McKay to build the fastest ships in the world in his East Boston shipyard.
An upcoming talk at the Massachusetts Historical Society by Caroline Frank of Brown University and Dane Morrison of Salem State University, moderated by Gwenn Miller from College of the Holy Cross will explore these connections. Titled “The Legacy of the China Trade in Massachusetts: Families, Fortunes, & Foreign Luxuries,” here’s how the event page describes it:
We live in a society where Chinese-made commodities are a part of everyday life. But dependence on foreign goods is not a modern American phenomenon. The economic, political, and social dimensions of early trade with China were felt on the domestic and individual levels, as reliance on tea, silks, and other materials sourced from China became staples in early American households. Massachusetts merchant families were able to capitalize on a hunger for these goods to shape the city as well as their own fortunes.
The talk will take place at the MHS on Boylston Street on July 30 at 6pm, with a reception beginning at 5:30. Advanced registration is required, and there is a $10 fee, unless you’re an MHS member or EBT card holder.
Annexation and Perambulation (episode 141)
Jul 14, 2019
This week’s show revisits two classic HUB History episodes that are all about the boundaries of the city of Boston. First, we’ll go back to a show that originally aired last January to learn why independent towns like Roxbury, Dorchester, and Charlestown were eager to be annexed into the city of Boston in the mid- to late-19th century, and we’ll examine why Boston hasn’t annexed any other municipalities since Hyde Park in 1912. Of course, once you make the boundaries of the city bigger by annexing your neighbors, you have to keep track of those new boundaries. So our second clip will be from a show that aired way back in September of 2017, about the ancient practice of perambulating the bounds. Since the 1650s, Massachusetts law has required towns to clearly mark their boundaries with other towns, and to send somebody out to walk the line and examine the markers every five years.
A 2007 proposal by a real estate developer to annex 100 acres from Dedham and add it to Hyde Park.
An aggressive 2013 proposal to annex all towns within the 617 area code.
Perambulation
Big thanks this week to Marta Crilly, Reference and Outreach Archivist at Boston City Archives, for finding a trove of documentation on modern perambulations of the bounds.
Thanks also to Adam Gaffin of Universal Hub, whose 2012 post was our first exposure to the concept of perambulating the bounds.
Some New England towns still perambulate their bounds, but they’re not all happy about it.
The southernmost point in Boston, where four towns meet.
Boston, Dedham, Canton, and Milton meet in the woods along the Neponset.
A boundary stone along Center Street in West Roxbury
The boundary between Boston and Brookline near Fenway station.
This boundary stone now stands entirely within the bounds of Boston…
Because it marks our former boundary with Hyde Park.
Boston Book Club
Last summer Adam Gaffin of the local news site Universal Hub published an article titled “Stony Brook: Boston’s Stygian River,” an in depth description of how an 1886 flood inspired the city to bury the Stony Brook. The midsized river originates in the high ground where West Roxbury, Hyde Park, and Roslindale all come together, and it once wound its way through Roxbury until it drained into the Muddy River near its confluence with the Charles. The brook was so clean and clear that a series of breweries were founded in Roxbury to make beer with its delicious water. Eventually, however, too many factories discharged their waste into the river, and it became polluted. As the watershed became heavily populated and industrialized, the Stony Brook’s annual floods could no longer be tolerated.
Using many wonderful historic maps and photos, Gaffin’s article describes “a decades-long project to create Boston’s underground river – a 7 1/2-mile waterway on which the sun never shines. Throw in all the marshes that were filled and the tributaries that were also covered and you end up with a project to rival the creation of the Back Bay, one that affected hundreds of acres of land from Hyde Park to the Charles River.” He follows the historic route of the Brook, describes the construction techniques used to build the massive scale tunnels that now carry it, and takes the reader on a virtual tour showing how to trace the route of the current underground river.
The article hits the sweet spot between urban infrastructure and Boston history, and it sits well with this week’s theme of 19th century development and expansion.
Upcoming Event
And for our upcoming event this week, we’re featuring a special 30th anniversary screening of the movie Glory. When it was released in the summer of 1989, Glory became an instant hit and critical darling, winning three Oscars and a host of other awards. The movie is a Civil War epic, which focuses on the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment, which we’ve mentioned on the podcast many times. Starring Morgan Freeman, Denzel Washington, and Matthew Broderick, the film follows the all-black regiment and their white officers from their training in Readville, the neighborhood where I live, to the battlefield at Fort Wagner, South Carolina. Roger Ebert’s 1990 review summarizes the plot, and one of the film’s major criticisms, quite nicely:
“Glory” tells the story of the 54th Regiment largely through the eyes of Robert Gould Shaw, who in an early scene in the film is seen horrified and disoriented by the violence of the battlefield.
Returned home to recover from wounds, he is recruited to lead a newly formed black regiment and takes the job even though his own enlightened abolitionist opinions still leave room for doubts about the capability of black troops.
It is up to the troops themselves to convince him they can fight – and along the way they also gently provide him with some insights into race and into human nature, a century before the flowering of the civil rights movement. Among the men who turn into the natural leaders of the 54th are Trip, an escaped slave, and John Rawlins, first seen in the film as a gravedigger who encounters the wounded Shaw on the field of battle.
These men are proud to be soldiers, proud to wear the uniform and also too proud to accept the racism they see all around them, as when a decision is made to pay black troops less than white. Blacks march as far, bleed as much and die as soon, they argue. Why should they be paid less for the same work? Shaw and his second in command, Cabot Forbes, eventually see the logic in this argument and join their men in refusing their paychecks. That action is a turning point for the 54th, fusing the officers and men together into a unit with mutual trust. And everything in the film leads up to the final bloody battle scene, a suicidal march up a hill that accomplishes little in concrete military terms but is of incalculable symbolic importance.
Watching “Glory,” I had one reccuring problem. I didn’t understand why it had to be told so often from the point of view of the 54th’s white commanding officer. Why did we see the black troops through his eyes – instead of seeing him through theirs? To put it another way, why does the top billing in this movie go to a white actor? I ask, not to be perverse, but because I consider this primarily a story about a black experience and do not know why it has to be seen largely through white eyes.
On July 21 and 24th, which are a Sunday and a Wednesday, the film will be screened at a handful of area theaters. It will be shown in the Fenway, and in Framingham, Revere, and Somerville. There are only two days of screenings, and there is only single showtime in some towns, so you probably want to try reserving tickets in advance.
Fifteen Blocks of Rage (episode 140)
Jul 07, 2019
For decades, a 1967 riot that rocked Roxbury’s Grove Hall neighborhood was generally referred to in the mainstream media as a “race riot” or as “the welfare riot,” while a handful of articles and books by Black authors called it “the police riot.” A group of mostly African American women who led a group called Mothers for Adequate Welfare were staging a sit-in protest at a welfare office on Blue Hill Avenue. When tensions escalated, the police stormed in and used force to remove the group. Onlookers were outraged by the violence and attempted to stop the police. The resulting riot spanned three nights in Roxbury, with arson, looting, and shots fired both by and at the police, and the scars it left behind took decades to heal.
Raw footage shot for WHDH showing the MAW sit-in and subsequent riot all mixed together. The caption says that there is also footage of the 1968 riot after Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination, but I believe this is nearly all from 1967. At 6:19-7:354, you can see the MAW sit-in at Grove Hall, with shots of looting after that. At 12:00, police muster at Schoolboy Stadium. At 31:43, police take bolt cutters into the welfare office to cut the chains. The header image is taken from 31:50-32:12 and shows protesters being dragged out of the welfare office, as violence becomes inevitable.
I’m not sure if the scary music and racist voiceover were in the original news footage below, or if they were added when the video was uploaded to YouTube.
Boston Book Club
Published by the UMass Press in 2014, A People’s History of the New Boston, by Jim Vrabel applies the ethos of Howard Zinn’s ever popular People’s History of the US on a local scale, taking on Boston in the 20th century. Vrabel is a historian, community activist, and longtime city employee. His other works have tried to assemble a complete timeline of Boston, from pre-history through today, but this one focuses on postwar Boston. Here’s how the publisher describes it:
Although Boston today is a vibrant and thriving city, it was anything but that in the years following World War II. By 1950 it had lost a quarter of its tax base over the previous twenty-five years, and during the 1950s it would lose residents faster than any other major city in the country.
Credit for the city’s turnaround since that time is often given to a select group of people, all of them men, all of them white, and most of them well off. In fact, a large group of community activists, many of them women, people of color, and not very well off, were also responsible for creating the Boston so many enjoy today. This book provides a grassroots perspective on the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s, when residents of the city’s neighborhoods engaged in an era of activism and protest unprecedented in Boston since the American Revolution.
Using interviews with many of those activists, contemporary news accounts, and historical sources, Jim Vrabel describes the demonstrations, sit-ins, picket lines, boycotts, and contentious negotiations through which residents exerted their influence on the city that was being rebuilt around them. He includes case histories of the fights against urban renewal, highway construction, and airport expansion; for civil rights, school desegregation, and welfare reform; and over Vietnam and busing. He also profiles a diverse group of activists from all over the city, including Ruth Batson, Anna DeFronzo, Moe Gillen, Mel King, Henry Lee, and Paula Oyola. Vrabel tallies the wins and losses of these neighborhood Davids as they took on the Goliaths of the time, including Boston’s mayors. He shows how much of the legacy of that activism remains in Boston today.
Upcoming Event
The third annual transcribe-a-thon at the Massachusetts Historical Society is coming up on July 13. The first transcribe-a-thon was held in July of 2017 to mark John Quincy Adams’ 250th birthday. Sara Martin, the editor in chief of the Adams Papers for the Massachusetts Historical Society, describes the project of digitizing over 15,000 pages of John Quincy’s diaries and how volunteers on the transcribe-a-thon contributed to American historiography:
John Quincy Adams (JQA, 1767–1848) is one of America’s great statesmen. The oldest son of founders John and Abigail Adams, his distinguished career in public service spanned six decades and included roles as diplomat, secretary of state, president, and congressman. For 68 years, JQA kept a diary of his public and private experiences. The 51-volume diary comprises the longest continuous record of any American of the time and provides an unparalleled resource not only for scholars—the traditional audience for this type of publication—but for educators, students, and a general public interested in history. Building on a project completed more than a decade ago that digitized the entire JQA manuscript diary and created basic metadata for every date entry, the DJQA project will make JQA’s diary truly accessible for the first time by presenting a verified and searchable transcription of each entry on the MHS website.
Participatory engagement with transcription of a historical archive can be a powerful marketing tool, but adequate quality controls must be built in to a project in order to yield a transcription that meets the standard of the documentary editing community. In the summer of 2017, the MHS attempted to bridge this divide when it held its first transcribe-a-thon to commemorate JQA’s birthday. Over the course of several hours, 30 participants transcribed nearly 80 pages of the diary. To provide some control, we asked each participant to start by transcribing the same short paragraph that contained many of JQA’s quirks of handwriting. This gave us a qualitative baseline by which to review the transcriptions and make quick determinations about usability. Overall, approximately 90 percent of the transcriptions were incorporated into the project’s transcription files. The transcribe-a-thon also yielded a handful of volunteer transcribers, another way the DJQA project is trying to engage the public in its work. All transcriptions, however, will be verified before being published online, a vital step of the process and one that is best done by project staff in order to maintain the standards of the Adams Papers edition as a whole.
If you’d like to participate in this year’s transcribe-a-thon at the MHS on Saturday, July 13 from 10am to 3pm, please register through the MHS. Attendance is free, and lunch will be provided. Thanks in advance for all you do to make the Adams Papers online an even richer historical resource, and helping to digitize the full text of JQA’s diary for people like me to search through and read online.
Founding the Boston Symphony Orchestra (episode 139)
Jun 30, 2019
Boston has long been known as the Hub of the Universe, but it’s also a hub of world class arts institutions. One of those institutions is the Boston Symphony Orchestra. This week, we’re looking at the founding of the BSO and the construction of its iconic home, Symphony Hall. We’ll discuss the characters that brought the BSO and Symphony Hall to life, as well as the remarkable features of the concert hall, known for its near-perfect acoustics.
Program from the inaugural performance at the Boston Music Hall
Boston Book Club
You may recall Michael Patrick MacDonald from our previous Boston Book Club selection, All Souls. A native of South Boston’s Old Colony housing project, MacDonald wrote candidly about the crime, violence, drugs, and poverty that plagued a community that was simultaneously tight-knit and protective of his own.
Michael Patrick MacDonald’s second volume of memoir, called Easter Rising, follows a very different pattern. Here’s how MacDonald’s website describes the book:
In Easter Rising Michael Patrick MacDonald tells the story of how he escaped Old Colony housing project, and learned to live again. Desperate to avoid the “normal” life of crime and drugs that surrounds him, Michael crosses the bridge into the bigger world and reinvents himself in the burgeoning punk rock movement downtown. At nineteen MacDonald escapes further, to Paris and then London. Out of money, he contacts his Irish immigrant grandfather — who offers a loan after securing a promise that Michael will visit Ireland. It is this reluctant journey “home” that reconciles MacDonald with his neighborhood, his family, and his heritage — and the real way forward. A roots journey laced with both rebellion and profound redemption.
Though All Souls is now part of the BPS reading curriculum, Jake and Nikki prefer Easter Rising. An insightful review on GoodReads describes the connection between the two memoirs:
Michael Patrick MacDonald’s All Souls: A Family Story from Southie told the story of the loss of four of his siblings to the violence, poverty, and gangsterism of Boston’s Irish American ghetto. The question “How did you get out?” has haunted MacDonald ever since. In response he has written this new book, a searingly honest story of reinvention that begins with young MacDonald’s breakaway from the soul-crushing walls of Southie’s Old Colony housing project and ends with two healing journeys to Ireland that are unlike anything in Irish American literature.
The story begins with MacDonald’s first urgent forays outside Southie, into Boston and eventually to New York’s East Village, where he becomes part of the club scene swirling around Johnny Rotten, Mission of Burma, the Clash, and other groups. MacDonald’s one-of-a-kind 1980s social history gives us a powerful glimpse of what punk music is for him: a lifesaving form of subversion and self-education. But family tragedies draw him home again, where trauma and guilt lead to an emotional collapse. In a harrowing yet hilarious scene of self-discovery, MacDonald meets his father for the first time — much too late. After this spectacularly failed attempt to connect, MacDonald travels to Ireland, first as an alienated young man who has learned to hate shamrocks with a passion, and then on a second trip with his extraordinary “Ma,” a roots journey laced with both rebellion and profound redemption.
Upcoming Event
Rebecca Byrd of UNC Charlotte is presenting a brown bag lunch event at Massachusetts Historical Society brown bag lunch event on Wednesday June 26 at noon. The topic will be Susie King Taylor: A Legacy of Black Womanhood and Historic Preservation. Taylor was the first Black Army nurse, and she tended to an all Black army troop named the 1st South Carolina Volunteers and later redesignated the 33rd United States Colored Infantry Regiment, where her husband served for four years during the Civil War. Despite her service, like many Black nurses, she was never paid for her work. As the author of Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33rd United States Colored Troops, Late 1st S.C. Volunteers, she was the only Black woman to publish a memoir of her wartime experiences. She was also the first Black person to teach openly in a school for formerly enslaved people in Georgia.
Susie King Taylor was not Sojourner Truth or Harriet Tubman. Although she does not have the notoriety of those two women, her story is no less important. As the first African American army nurse who traveled with the First South Carolina Volunteers during the Civil War, an educator for freed people, and founder of the Women’s Relief Corps., Ms. Taylor is truly a remarkable woman. Although she remains in an unmarked grave, a younger historian has been tasked to preserve her legacy into the digital age.Brown Bag Lunch Programs allow MHS research fellows to present and discuss their work. Programs are free and open to the public–pack a lunch and join us, no RSVP required.
Hooker Day in Boston (episode 138)
Jun 23, 2019
Hooker Day was a one-time holiday celebrated in Boston in 1903. While it might sound like this is going to be an X-rated podcast, we’re not talking about that kind of hooker. Civil War General Joseph “Fighting Joe” Hooker was briefly the commander of the main Union force called the Army of the Potomac. Forty years after his command, he was immortalized with a massive statue in front of our State House. When the statue was dedicated, the entire city celebrated a holiday that was called Hooker Day in his honor.
Hooker mounted in 1903
Master Joseph Hooker Wood and the sculptors
Route of the parade
Recalling Hooker’s glory days
The State House decked out in bunting with a shrouded statue
Ready for the unveiling
Legislation authorizing the erection of a statue of General Hooker at the State House.
The article describes them as “a veritable “Who’s Who” of 19th-century Black Boston dressed to the nines in Victorian finery. The images bring to life politicians, military officers, literary figures, financiers, abolitionists and children, formally posed in opulent studio settings and gazing with great dignity directly at the camera.” They belonged to Harriet Hayden, an African American woman who, along with her husband Lewis, escaped slavery to become a major figure on Boston’s underground railroad.
The opening of the article describes one of the portraits:
With a quiet, unflinching confidence, Virginia L. Molyneaux Hewlett Douglass posed for the photographer, one slender hand rustling the pleats of her fine silk dress. Although portraits were trendy and accessible in the 1860s when hers was shot, hand-colored photographs were a luxury, and this one is saturated with shades of emerald and lilac, underlining Virginia’s wealth and high social standing as the wife of Frederick Douglass, Jr., son of the celebrated abolitionist. Her name is handwritten above the portrait in flowery cursive as Mrs. Frederick Douglas, pasted into one of two recently discovered albums that have the potential to change much of what we know of the network of African-Americans centered around the steep north slope of Boston’s Beacon Hill in the 1860s and beyond.
Upcoming Historical Event
Mass Humanities is sponsoring a series called Reading Frederick Douglass Together that’s being held across the Commonwealth this summer. On July 2, people will gather on Boston Common to take part in reading from Douglass’s 1852 speech, “What to the slave is the Fourth of July?”
Though Frederick Douglass had strong ties to Boston and gave many speeches here, this (his most famous address) was given in Rochester, New York. It was delivered on July 5th as a response to the city’s Independence Day celebrations, and it takes aim squarely on the promise of the Declaration that “all men are created equal,” and contrasts the beautiful sentiment of that phrase with the reality of enslavement that he had grown up in and that still continued to that day. He said, in part:
Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?
But, such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn you that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation whose crimes, lowering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrecoverable ruin! I can to-day take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people!
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.
It’s uncomfortable to read, even today, because it forces you to examine uncomfortable truths about our nation’s founding and founders. If you have to confront an uncomfortable truth, why not do it with friends? Here in Boston, the reading will be held at noon on Tuesday, July 2 in front of the memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Volunteers. However, if you won’t be in Boston, we’ll be sure to link to the entire event schedule from Mass Humanities. Readings will be held in different towns from June 27 to September 28. At each one, members of the public can volunteer to read a passage from the speech, and everyone takes turns until the whole thing is complete.
ED Leavitt, Fresh Water, and Steam Power (episode 137)
Jun 16, 2019
For centuries before the Quabbin reservoir opened, Boston struggled to provide enough clean, fresh water for its growing population. One of the solutions to this problem was a new reservoir built at Chestnut Hill in the 1880s. The pumping station at this reservoir was home to enormous steam powered pumping engines, and it’s preserved today as the Metropolitan Waterworks Museum. Eric Peterson joins us this week to talk about the history of Boston’s water supply, steam power, and a brilliant engineer who designed the steam pumps that provided Boston’s water.
Hoisting engine
Pumping engine model
Mining engine
Mining engine
If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to visit the Metropolitan Waterworks Museum. It’s really a terrific museum, and one that most people never see.
Boston Book Club
Our pick for the Boston Book Club this week is called Eden on the Charles, the Making of Boston, by Michael Rawson. You may have noticed that I’m a bit of an infrastructure nerd, and this is one of my go-to books about the infrastructure that makes up Boston. We’ve used this book as a source for our shows about annexation, perambulating the bounds, and the Mother Brook. It’s both a history of 400 years of urban planning in Boston, and the mirror image of that, which is the environmental history of the city.
Here’s how the publisher’s website describes the book:
Drinking a glass of tap water, strolling in a park, hopping a train for the suburbs: some aspects of city life are so familiar that we don’t think twice about them. But such simple actions are structured by complex relationships with our natural world. The contours of these relationships—social, cultural, political, economic, and legal—were established during America’s first great period of urbanization in the nineteenth century, and Boston, one of the earliest cities in America, often led the nation in designing them. A richly textured cultural and social history of the development of nineteenth-century Boston, this book provides a new environmental perspective on the creation of America’s first cities.
Eden on the Charles explores how Bostonians channeled country lakes through miles of pipeline to provide clean water; dredged the ocean to deepen the harbor; filled tidal flats and covered the peninsula with houses, shops, and factories; and created a metropolitan system of parks and greenways, facilitating the conversion of fields into suburbs. The book shows how, in Boston, different class and ethnic groups brought rival ideas of nature and competing visions of a “city upon a hill” to the process of urbanization—and were forced to conform their goals to the realities of Boston’s distinctive natural setting. The outcomes of their battles for control over the city’s development were ultimately recorded in the very fabric of Boston itself. In Boston’s history, we find the seeds of the environmental relationships that—for better or worse—have defined urban America to this day.
If you want to know more about how the development of Boston’s systems of water and sewage, its filled land and dredged harbor created today’s sprawling city from the puritan village on a peninsula that it evolved from, check out the book.
Upcoming Historical Event
And for our upcoming event this week, we have a talk at the main library in Copley Square this Thursday, June 20. Melnea Cass was a prolific activist in the early and mid-20th century who became affectionately known as “the First Lady of Roxbury.” Over a long career, she worked on everything from women’s suffrage to the settlement house movement to school desegregation. Early in her career, she worked directly with NAACP cofounder William Monroe Trotter, who we discussed in our show about Black Boston’s protests against the racist film Birth of a Nation. Later in her career, she would be president of the NAACP Boston chapter. Before her death in 1978, she had been granted at least three honorary doctorates by Boston schools, a swimming pool and skating rink had been named after her, and mayor John Collins had declared a citywide Melnea Cass day.
This event focuses on the very earliest days of her career as an activist, though. When she was 21 years old, Melnea Jones married Marshall Cass, a soldier who was soon deployed to Europe during the First World War. While Marshall was away, Melnea moved in with her new mother-in-law, Rose Brown. Rose was a fierce suffragist and an early member of the NAACP. Through Rose’s club memberships, Melnea Cass met a group she later described as “women who we looked up to, who were leaders in the community, just simple leaders… They were simply people who lived in the community, who’d try to help you and tell you things to do… just good neighbors, that’s all.”
These role models inspired a lifetime of service to her community, and they’re the topic of Thursday’s talk, titled Bridging the Gap. Here’s how the library website describes it:
Melnea Cass is well known for organizing the sit-ins over school segregation in Boston and leading the fights over urban renewal and highway construction in the South End and Roxbury. However a young Melnea Cass in 1919 first learned community organizing from her mother-in-law Rosa Brown. Join us to learn how Rosa Brown helped guide Melnea Cass.
Boston Marriages in Literature and Life (episode 136)
Jun 09, 2019
A new form of relationship arose between 19th century women, which had all the emotional trappings of romantic love, but was long considered to be merely an intense form of friendship. More recently, however, critics have wondered whether Victorian assumptions about the inherent chasteness of womankind allowed couples who would consider themselves lesbians today to hide in plain sight.
These relationships came to be known as “Boston marriages,” both because a number of high profile Bostonians engaged in them, and because Henry James popularized the concept in his novel The Bostonians. As the story of the name indicates, real relationships between women were influenced by contemporary literature by James, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Oliver Wendall Holmes, but these authors also drew inspiration from the apparently romantic relationships they saw between women in their lives.
Our header picture portrays Annie Adams Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett inside their famous drawing room at 148 Charles Street at the foot of Beacon Hill. It’s a parking garage today.
Boston Book Club
Improper Bostonians, not to be confused with the magazine Improper Bostonian, was published in 1998. The book was compiled by the History Project, which is an independent community archive of Boston’s LGBTQ history. The project started as an exhibit at Boston Public Library in 1996, focusing on the history of the LGBTQ community in Boston prior to Stonewall. After that exhibit drew tens of thousands of visitors, the History Project began adapting the material into the book, which was published two years later with a forward by congressman Barney Frank.
The book attempts to reconstruct the often deliberately obscured history of homosexuality in Boston throughout history. It opens with a discussion of sodomy laws in the earliest days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, while also exploring how Puritans could embrace same sex love between men, even governor John Winthrop, if it didn’t upset the social order. The book continues into the 18th century, examining cases of non traditional gender roles, including the story of Deborah Sampson, who disguised herself as a man to fight with honor in the Revolution.
With each successive era, the book sprawls out bigger, as more of the history can be recovered. The section covering the 19th century fills more pages than the previous 200 years combined. Although familiar figures like Walt Whitman are featured, many of the chapters in this section embrace famous women, including some of those featured in this episode.
The 20th century is divided into sections for 1900 to 1945 and then 1945 to 1969, and each of those sections is about as large as the section for the 19th century, as homosexuality became more openly discussed. One of the last chapters is a profile of Prescott Townsend, who you might recall from our show about him last November. Born in 1894, Townsend In many ways embodied the 20th century experience of LGBTQ Boston, graduating from a Harvard that was still overtly hostile to homosexuality, serving in the military during the First World War, and then spending his entire life advocating for gay rights, before finally marching in the first pride parade when he was 76 years old.
If you can’t find a copy of Improper Bostonians, you can get a taste of the material from this slideshow. It’s based on the same exhibit put on at the BPL by the History Project.
Upcoming Historical Event
Our featured event this week marks a century of women’s suffrage. The effort to pass legislation allowing women to vote in American elections began picking up steam in the Reconstruction era after the Civil War and went into overdrive with the turn of the 20th century. After a decade long legislative fight, a Constitutional amendment was passed by the House of Representatives in May of 1919, and on June 4 the Senate approved it. When it was ratified by the states the following year, the 19th amendment said simply “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”
For far too long, the history of how American women won the right to vote has been told as the tale of a few iconic leaders, all white and native-born. But Susan Ware uncovered a much broader and more diverse story waiting to be told. Why They Marched is a tribute to the many women who worked tirelessly in communities across the nation, out of the spotlight, protesting, petitioning, and insisting on their right to full citizenship.
Ware tells her story through the lives of nineteen activists, most of whom have long been overlooked. We meet Mary Church Terrell, a multilingual African American woman; Rose Schneiderman, a labor activist building coalitions on New York’s Lower East Side; Claiborne Catlin, who toured the Massachusetts countryside on horseback to drum up support for the cause; Mary Johnston, an aristocratic novelist bucking the Southern ruling elite; Emmeline W. Wells, a Mormon woman in a polygamous marriage determined to make her voice heard; and others who helped harness a groundswell of popular support. We also see the many places where the suffrage movement unfolded—in church parlors, meeting rooms, and the halls of Congress, but also on college campuses and even at the top of Mount Rainier. Few corners of the United States were untouched by suffrage activism.
Ware’s deeply moving stories provide a fresh account of one of the most significant moments of political mobilization in American history. The dramatic, often joyous experiences of these women resonate powerfully today, as a new generation of young women demands to be heard.
The event begins at 6pm. Admission is free, but advanced registration is required.
The Underground Railroad on Boston Harbor (episode 135)
Jun 02, 2019
In the 19th century, a network of abolitionists and sympathizers in Boston helped enslaved African Americans find their way to freedom in the Northern states or Canada. It’s a topic we’ve talked about before, but this time there’s a twist. We’re going to be examining how Boston’s position as an important port city changed the dynamic of seeking freedom. Jake sat down with National Park Service ranger Shawn Quigley to discuss how the underground railroad ran right through Boston Harbor.
The header image is from Austin Bearse’s memoir Reminiscences of the Fugitive Slave Law Days in Boston, and it’s captioned “Landing a fugitive slave at Drake’s Wharf, South Boston, from the yacht Moby Dick, Captain Austin Bearse, on the night of July 18, 1853.”
If you haven’t listened to it in the past, check out our three part special on Boston’s resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act from the early days of our podcast.
Boston Book Club
As long as we’re talking about the Harbor Islands today, we thought it would make sense to share a guidebook with you. As we may have mentioned before, the Harbor Islands are some of our favorite places in Greater Boston. Whether we’re sitting around a bonfire on the beach and watching the sun set behind the Boston skyline, skipping stones on quiet waters, or crawling into the hidden passages of a World War I era fort, exploring the Harbor Islands is a great way to spend a day.
Discovering the Boston Harbor Islands by Christopher Klein is arranged as an island by island guide, focusing on the geography and available recreational opportunities on each one. The whole thing is richly illustrated with photos, maps, and historic images. There are long historical sidebars about events that took place on different islands, as well as commentary on modern environmental challenges.
Here’s how the publisher’s website describes the book:
Discovering the Boston Harbor Islands is an indispensable resource for those who want to uncover the best kept secret in the Northeast.
Part history, part travel guide, this book is the most compelling invitation to explore the Boston Harbor Islands National Park area to date. Complete with resource listings of recreational activities on and around the harbor islands and richly illustrated with over 150 full-color photographs, Christopher Klein’s comprehensive coverage and keen wit are sure to inspire thousands of landlubbers and mariners to leave port for many summers to come.
Explore the military installations that protected Boston during wartime including Fort Warren, home of Confederate prisoners during the Civil War. Visit Boston Light on Little Brewster, site of the nation’s oldest lighthouse. Kayak into the coves where pirates and bootleggers once hid. Wander the meadows that were the camps of Native Americans and the sites of Revolutionary skirmishes. Sail to the outer islands, a spectacular ocean wilderness. Find the best year-round fishing spots and discover why the islands are a birders paradise. Dive amid century-old shipwrecks or climb to the top of Spectacle Island for an altogether different view of the Boston skyline. Take in a jazz concert, an antique baseball game, or simply hop from one island to the next to experience the stunning natural beauty of this most storied national park area.
Discovering the Boston Harbor Islands is sure to resonate with new and veteran islanders. Whether it’s hiking, camping, a trip through history, or a simple getaway to spend a day at the beach, a visit to the harbor islands offers an outdoor experience wholly unique to the geography and heritage of Boston. Don’t leave port without it!
Upcoming Historical Event
Since this week’s episode deals with the enslavement of humans and resistance to the practice, we thought having a related event would be a good idea. Few antebellum lawmakers pressed the issue of slavery as consistently or persistently as John Quincy Adams. The opinion of this podcast is that he got his conscience on the issue from one source: his mother.
Though Abigail Adams grew up in a family that enslaved people, she always detested the practice as an adult. In 1774, she wrote, “I wish most sincerely there was not a Slave in the province. It allways appeard a most iniquitious Scheme to me-fight ourselfs for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have. You know my mind upon this Subject.” Many years later, she fought for equal access to education, writing in 1797, “The Boy is a Freeman as much as any of the young Men, and merely because his Face is Black, is he to be denied instruction? Is this the Christian principle of doing to others, as we would have others do to us?”
Edith Gelles, a senior scholar with the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University, is an award-winning historian and author of Abigail & John: Portrait of a Marriage and Portia: The World of Abigail Adams. Gelles will discuss her current research on Abigail’s thoughts and experiences with slavery and race.
The talk starts at 6pm, and it costs $10, unless you’re an MHS member or an EBT cardholder.
Love is Love: John Adams and Marriage Equality (episode 134)
May 26, 2019
15 years ago, the landmark case Goodridge v. Department of Public Health granted marriage rights to same-sex couples in Massachusetts. The November 18, 2003, decision was the first by a U.S. state’s highest court to find that same-sex couples had the right to marry, and it was grounded in the language of equal justice that John Adams wrote into our state constitution. Despite numerous attempts to delay the ruling, and to reverse it, the first marriage licenses were issued to same-sex couples on May 17, 2004.
WFNX carried a live broadcast from Cambridge city hall on the evening of March 16, 2004, as the nation’s first legal same-sex marriages were performed in front of jubilant crowds.
Video from the Human Rights Campaign of some of the couples and supporters at Cambridge City Hall.
Boston Book Club
Johnny Tremain is a work of historical fiction by Esther Forbes, intended for teen-aged readers, that is set in Boston prior to and during the outbreak of the American Revolution. The story begins on July 23, 1773, in the Boston silversmith shop of elderly Ephraim Lapham, where Johnny is a promising 14-year-old apprentice. It is understood that someday he will marry Mr. Lapham’s granddaughter Cilla to keep the shop within the Lapham family. The shop soon receives a challenging and urgent order from wealthy merchant John Hancock to make a silver dish to replace one that Mr. Lapham fashioned decades before. While preparing Hancock’s order, Johnny’s hand is badly burned. With a hand crippled beyond use, he can no longer be a silversmith and he leaves the shop.
Johnny settles into a job delivering a weekly newspaper, the Boston Observer. The Observer is a Whig publication, and Johnny is introduced to the larger world of pre-revolutionary Boston politics by his new friend and mentor Rab Silsbee, an older boy working for the paper.
As months go by and tension between Whigs and Tories rises, Johnny becomes a dedicated Whig himself. Johnny and Rab take part in the Boston Tea Party and, as I am sure our listeners know, Britain sends an army to occupy Boston and closes Boston’s port in retaliation
Johnny acts as a spy for the Sons of Liberty when, in addition to his newspaper deliveries, he is paid by British officers to carry their letters to outlying towns. He becomes a trusted member working with prominent Whig leaders John Hancock, Samuel Adams, Paul Revere and Doctor Joseph Warren. The novel reaches its climax in April 1775 with the outbreak and immediate aftermath of the Battles of Lexington and Concord. But of course, that’s really just the beginning…
Join Old South Meeting House staff and neighbors for light refreshments, a short lecture at 5:15 on the 1729 historic site’s fascinating historic preservation story, and an opportunity to explore the permanent exhibition, Voices of Protest, at your leisure. Learn why we have an 18th-century horseshoe in our permanent exhibits, how the Meeting House is indebted to a fire engine from New Hampshire, how Louisa May Alcott and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow supported the Meeting Houses preservation in the late 1800s, why William Lloyd Garrison didn’t … and how this building’s preservation story continues as it approaches its 300th birthday!
Advanced registration is not required, and admission is free thanks to funding from the Lowell Institute.
A Genuine, Bonafide, Non-Electrified Monorail! (episode 133)
May 19, 2019
You may think taking the T is painful today, but back in the days of horsedrawn streetcars, public transportation was slow, inefficient, and frequently snarled in downtown traffic. In the 1880s, proposals for elevated railways and subways competed for attention as Boston’s rapid transit solution. Then, an ambitious inventor stormed the scene with a groundbreaking proposal for a monorail. He even went as far as building a mile long track in East Cambridge, showing that the monorail worked. If it hadn’t been for bad luck and bad politics, we might all be taking monorails instead of today’s Red and Orange lines, but instead the monorail turned out to be more of a Shelbyville idea.
In this 19th century Photoshop job, see the elevated railway that Bostonians feared would block out the sun.
Our #mysteryphoto was really an #AprilFools photo! This photo is a mockup for an Elevated Rail on Tremont St that was never built. Its probably from 1894 or 1895. Here's a real photo of Tremont St in the same time period. pic.twitter.com/dnhbrUQWv9
— Boston City Archives (@ArchivesBoston) April 1, 2019
And here is the construction of the actual Orange Line, proving that they might have been right to be afraid.
— Boston City Archives (@ArchivesBoston) May 16, 2019
Boston Book Club
Greater Boston is high on the shortlist of my favorite podcasts, and it’s the only fiction podcast I currently listen to, what they would call an audio drama. If you’re listening to our show, you probably love not only history but also Boston, which makes you the perfect prospect for Greater Boston. It’s set in a slightly fictionalized, historically informed version of our city, where the streets of the North End are permanently sticky from the molasses flood, where the roller coasters at Wonderland can still scare you half to death, and where a garbage fire on Spectacle Island has been burning for decades.
The first season starts with a series of seemingly disconnected stories centering around a single family, but as the season moves along, the story lines slowly weave together into a tightly crafted tapestry, and the plot spirals outward to include dozens of central characters and encompass an elaborately constructed world that takes in all of Greater Boston, with occasional side trips to Alaska, Oregon, and even the mythical city of Atlantis.
In this version of Boston, the citizens are considering a ballot initiative that would have the the Red Line secede and form its own independent city. In this version of Boston, a dead man becomes one of the most important characters, after his soul is trapped in a crystal ball. And in this version of Boston, a Trumpian figure has risen in response to a series of terrorist attacks that harken back to the Boston Tea Party and the Great Molasses Flood.
The show just wrapped up its third season, meaning you have 38 full episodes, plus about 25 bonus episodes to catch up on. In the most recent story arc, the slightly sci-fi world of Greater Boston has served as a backdrop for a narrative that seems to be pulled directly from our contemporary world. It takes on Boston’s housing crisis, racist redlining, gentrification, and the rise of authoritarian government, while maintaining a playful sense of humor and never seeming to preach to the listener. And this is a show that you have to listen to from the beginning, since it has slowly spread out to encompass at least twenty main characters with deep back stories and an elaborately constructed world.
If it’s not clear, I am an unabashed fan of this show.
Upcoming Event
And for our upcoming event this week, we have a talk about a transportation method you might use if you’re not taking the red line or an experimental monorail. On Thursday, June 13, cycling historian Lorenz J Finison will be giving a talk at the Copley Square library about the resurgence of cycling in 20th century Boston.
Here’s how the library website describes the event:
At the end of the nineteenth century, cycling’s popularity surged in the Boston area, but by 1900, the trend faded. Within the next few decades, automobiles became commonplace and roads were refashioned to serve them. Lorenz J. Finison presents the evolution and renaissance that local bicycling witnessed in the 1970s as concerns over physical and environmental health coalesced. Whether cyclists hit the roads on their way to work or to work out, went off-road in the mountains or to race via cyclocross and BMX, or took part in charity rides, biking was back in a major way.
Finison traces the city’s cycling history, chronicling the activities of environmental and social justice activists, stories of women breaking into male-dominated professions by becoming bike messengers and mechanics, and challenges faced by African American cyclists. Making use of newspaper archives, newly discovered records of local biking organizations, and interviews with Boston-area bicyclists and bike builders, Boston’s Twentieth Century Bicycling Renaissance brings these voices and battles back to life.
Taking Louisbourg, the Gibraltar of North America (episode 132)
May 12, 2019
This week’s show is about the namesake of the famous Louisbourg Square on Beacon Hill, an astonishing 1745 military victory won by a Massachusetts volunteer army made up of farmers, seamen, and merchants. After war broke out with France the year before, Governor William Shirley proposed a daring plan to attack the French fortress of Louisbourg. Located on Cape Breton Island, off the coast of Nova Scotia, Louisbourg was considered impregnable. Through a combination of luck, good leadership, and gallant conduct, the New England army conquered the Gibraltar of North America. However, the victory was short lived, setting the stage for two wars that American history remembers more clearly.
Our header image is from this broadside with lyrics to a song celebrating the victory at Louisbourg.
Boston Book Club
Our pick for the Boston Book Club this week harkens back to one of our past episodes. Back in episode 28, we talked about the 1919 Boston Police Strike, and if you want to get much more detail about the strike than our show got into, you can start with A City in Terror: Calvin Coolidge and the 1919 Boston Police Strike, by Francis Russell. Originally published in 1975, the story starts with, of all things, the author’s personal memories of his father being pressed into service as a temporary special policeman when the regular police department went out on strike. His duties were basically directing traffic on Blue Hill Ave, as the outlying neighborhoods of Mattapan and Dorchester where he grew up didn’t see the chaos and lawlessness that happened downtown.
After sharing the hazy memories of a nine year old, Russell settles down into a serious treatment of the strike. He gives a brief history of the Boston Police Department, describes the complaints that led the officers to form a union, and gives an overview of the political landscape of Massachusetts and Boston at the time that had thrust Calvin Coolidge to prominence. Then come the riots, and the aftermath.
The publisher’s description gives a hint at the author’s focus:
On September 9, 1919, an American nightmare came true. The entire Boston police force deserted their posts, leaving the city virtually defenseless. Women were raped on street corners, stores were looted, and pedestrians were beaten and robbed while crowds not only looked on but cheered.
The police strike and the mayhem that followed made an inconspicuous governor, Calvin Coolidge, known throughout America, turning him into a national hero and, eventually, a president. It also created a monster: for two days, more than 700,000 residents of Boston’s urban core were without police protection, and the mob ruled the streets.
Whether or not you believe, as Russell did, that the Boston Police Strike proves that public employees should have no right to organize, the book gives a deeper look at an often overlooked chapter in American history. With the centennial of the strike coming up in September, this is the perfect time to brush up on what happened. You can find a link to purchase the book in our show notes.
Historic Event
Past podcast guest Christian DiSpigna will be appearing at the Boston Athenaeum on May 28. Christian is the author of Founding Martyr: The Life and Death of Dr Joseph Warren, the American Revolution’s Lost Hero, and he joined us back in episode 103. Here’s how the Athenaeum describes it:
Christian Di Spigna’s definitive new biography of Warren is a loving work of historical excavation, the product of two decades of research and scores of newly unearthed primary-source documents that have given us this forgotten Founding Father anew. Following Warren from his farming childhood and years at Harvard through his professional success and political radicalization to his role in sparking the rebellion, Di Spigna’s thoughtful, judicious retelling not only restores Warren to his rightful place in the pantheon of Revolutionary greats, it deepens our understanding of the nation’s dramatic beginnings.
The talk begins at 12pm on Tuesday, May 28. Advanced registration is required. You’ll have to pay your way into the Athenaeum, but there’s no additional fee for the talk.
Love Behind Enemy Lines (episode 131)
May 05, 2019
We’re trying something new this week by bringing in a guest for our upcoming historical event segment. Clara Silverstein from Historic Newton tells us about their “Crossing Borders” series. Sticking with the theme, our show this week recounts a romance between young lovers that crossed enemy lines and political allegiances, uniting patriot Billy Tudor and loyalist Delia Jarvis. Even as the Revolutionary War began and Boston was besieged, Billy risked everything and swam across the harbor to visit Delia. As the war continued and they were separated by many miles, Billy would address his letters to Delia to “my fair loyalist,” and then sign them from “your ever faithful rebel.”
A note on names: There are times when it seems that everyone in the extended Tudor family was named either William or Delia for about 150 years. Our main characters William “Billy” Tudor and Delia (Jarvis) Tudor had children named William and Delia, whom we’ll refer to below as William II and Delia II. By son Frederic, they also had a grandson named William, whom we’ll call William III. Delia II married Charles Stewart, captain of the USS Constitution during her most famous victories in the War of 1812, becoming Delia Tudor Stewart. Charles and Delia (II) Tudor Stewart had a daughter named Delia (III) Tudor Stewart who married John Parnell. Delia (III) Tudor Stewart Parnell’s son Charles Stewart Parnell became an Irish nationalist hero.
William II published diaries by his grandfather (Billy’s father) Deacon John Tudor. William II’s notes include biographical information on Billy, as well as the story of Delia serving tea to the British after Lexington and Concord.
Our header image is from this beautifully colorized version of the famous Henry Pelham map of Boston during the siege from the Mount Vernon collection.
Boston Book Club
(phl carousel)
Our pick for the Boston Book Club this week is Bunker Hill: a City, a Siege, a Revolution, by Nathaniel Philbrick. Philbrick is the author of a veritable lending library of popular history titles, including books on the wreck of the whaleship Essex, Washington’s strategy at Yorktown, the Mayflower Pilgrims, and the battle of the Little Bighorn. We’ve used his book on Bunker Hill as a source for our episodes on Pope’s Night, the four burials of Joseph Warren, and practically anything to do with the Revolutionary era.
Boston in 1775 is an island city occupied by British troops after a series of incendiary incidents by patriots who range from sober citizens to thuggish vigilantes. After the Boston Tea Party, British and American soldiers and Massachusetts residents have warily maneuvered around each other until April 19, when violence finally erupts at Lexington and Concord. In June, however, with the city cut off from supplies by a British blockade and Patriot militia poised in siege, skirmishes give way to outright war in the Battle of Bunker Hill. It would be the bloodiest battle of the Revolution to come, and the point of no return for the rebellious colonists.Philbrick brings a fresh perspective to every aspect of the story. He finds new characters, and new facets to familiar ones. The real work of choreographing rebellion falls to a thirty-three year old physician named Joseph Warren who emerges as the on-the-ground leader of the Patriot cause and is fated to die at Bunker Hill. Others in the cast include Paul Revere, Warren’s fiancé the poet Mercy Scollay, a newly recruited George Washington, the reluctant British combatant General Thomas Gage and his more bellicose successor William Howe, who leads the three charges at Bunker Hill and presides over the claustrophobic cauldron of a city under siege as both sides play a nervy game of brinkmanship for control.With passion and insight, Philbrick reconstructs the revolutionary landscape-geographic and ideological-in a mesmerizing narrative of the robust, messy, blisteringly real origins of America.
Philbrick does exhaustive research, but his books are written for a general audience and easy to read. Even if you think you know the story of the battle of Bunker Hill, you’ll like this book.
Upcoming Event
For our upcoming event this week, we spoke with Clara Silverstein from Historic Newton about their series of events titled “Crossing Borders.” She told us about the four events (including one we’ve already missed) that are being organized by Historic Newton, the Natick Historical Society, the Needham History Center and Museum, and the Wellesley Historical Society.
Lower Falls Walking Tour, literally crossing the border between Newton and Wellesley on Sunday, April 28 at 1 p.m. Suggested donation, $10 per person. Find more details here.
The Suburban Development of Needham, Newton, Natick, and Wellesley. A free lecture with James O’Connell on Wednesday, May 22 at 7 p.m. at the Needham History Center & Museum, 1147 Central Avenue, Needham.
Women of Natick and Ponkapoag: The Untold History of Praying Towns. A free lecture Thursday, May 30 at 7 p.m. at the Morse Institute Library, 14 East Central St., Natick. Find more details here.
Down By the River: New Takes on Charles River History. A free lecture Tuesday, June 4 at 7 p.m. at the Durant-Kenrick House and Grounds, 286 Waverley Avenue, Newton.
Historic Newton says,
The collaboration grew from the recognition that borders in this region – municipal and psychological – have shifted over time. Together, the four organizations can interpret a larger story that crosses the porous borders between our cities and towns, engaging the public in learning about trends affecting our region.
Here are a few past episodes that we either mentioned in the interview, or perhaps we should have mentioned
Harnessing the Power of Boston's Tides (episode 130)
Apr 28, 2019
Harnessing the Power of Boston’s Tides (episode 130)
This week, we interview Earl Taylor, president of the Dorchester Historical Society and one of the founders of the Tide Mill Institute. He tells us how early Bostonians harnessed the power of the tides in Boston Harbor to grind their grain, manufacture products like snuff and spices, and even produce baby carriages. Plus, he shows us the advantages tidal power had over other types of mills, how tide mills shaped the landscape of Boston, and why tide mills went out of fashion.
Examples of identifying mill ponds from historic maps
Slades Mill in 185317th century Mill Dam in East Boston
Boston Book Club
Our pick for the Boston Book Club this week is the October 19, 1911 issue of Life Magazine. Before it became a photo-heavy weekly news magazine, Life was founded as a humor and general interest magazine. The first literary editor was one of the founders of the Harvard Lampoon, and he brought that acerbic wit to Life in the 1880s.
By the 19-teens, the magazine had a well established formula of clever prose, illustrations, brief poems, and editorial cartoons. It was the first venue where Charles Dana Gibson brought the Gibson Girl to the page. And in October of 1911, it released a satirical “Boston Number.” The cover sets the tone, with a bespectacled figure in outdated knee pants using a wooden pointer to gesture at a wall map labeled “Map of the World.” The map itself showed only the Shawmut peninsula.
Even the ads are fun!
Inside the magazine, Boston suffers a gentle send-up from people who are obviously familiar with our city, but who are writing for a national audience. They poke fun at our high regard for our own intellects and our overestimation of Boston’s national prominence.
You don’t have to haunt antiques markets and book stores to find a copy of the magazine to peruse. The whole thing is up on Google Books, and it’s worth a few minutes perusal, if you can ignore the anti-semitic caricatures in a few of the illustrations.
Upcoming Event
Presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams helped create the popular image of Boston that Life parodied in 1911. They are baked deep into Boston’s DNA, and they’re the subjects of a talk at the Massachusetts Historical Society on Saturday, March 4 at 4:30pm.
Nancy Isenberg is the T. Harry Williams Professor of American History at Louisiana State University, and the author of the New York Times bestseller White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, and Andrew Burstein is the Charles P. Manship Professor of History at LSU and author of numerous books on American political culture, including an earlier collaboration with Nancy Isenberg, Madison and Jefferson. Together, they wrote a new volume on the two Presidents Adams, and their reactions to popular sentiment and demagoguery in the early republic. The Problem of Democracy: The Presidents Adams Confront the Cult of Personality casts John and John Quincy as independent thinkers, unbound by party loyalties, and it traces their resistance to the hero worship of Franklin, Washington, Jefferson, and Jackson.
Here’s how the MHS website describes their talk:
John and John Quincy Adams were brilliant, prickly politicians and arguably the most independently minded among leaders of the founding generation. Distrustful of blind allegiance to a political party, they brought skepticism of a brand-new system of government to the country’s first 50 years. Join Isenberg and Burstein as they boldly recast the historical role of the Adamses and reflect on how father and son understood the inherent weaknesses in American democracy.
Among the many medical breakthroughs that are attributed to Boston, surgical anesthesia is among the most impactful. It’s hard to overstate the importance in medical history of ether for the treatment of pain, particularly for those undergoing surgical procedures. Many believe that this technique was pioneered at MGH under the famous Ether Dome, but history tells us a different origin story.
This week, we’re featuring Wicked Victorian Boston By Robert Wilhelm. Boston has a fairly stuffy reputation. We are, after all, the city that once outlawed Christmas in an effort to cut down on the amount of fun being had. And it isn’t all in the past – visitors to our stately city will be shocked to find that happy hour isn’t very happy, due to the lack of $3 margaritas. But our listeners know that Bostonians have not been afraid to riot, canoodle on the Charles, or gamble on rat fights in the North End. Wicked Victorian Boston details our lesser known and sordid history. The History Press, the publisher of the book, tells us:
Victorian Boston was more than just stately brownstones and elite society that graced neighborhoods like Beacon Hill. As the population grew, the city developed a seedy underbelly just below its surface. Illegal saloons, prostitution and sports gambling challenged the image of the Puritan City. Daughters of the Boston Brahmins posed for nude photographs. The grandson of President John Adams was roped into an elaborate confidence game. Reverend William Downs, a local Baptist pastor, was caught in bed with a married parishioner. Author Robert Wilhelm reveals the sinful history behind Boston’s Victorian grandeur.
Since 1945, American popular culture has portrayed suburbia as a place with a culture, politics, and economy distinct from cities, towns, and rural areas. Ronald Dale Karr examines the evolution of Brookline, Boston’s most renowned nineteenth-century suburb, arguing that a distinctively suburban way of life appeared here long before World War II.
Already a fashionable retreat for wealthy Bostonians, Brookline began to suburbanize in the 1840s with the arrival of hundreds of commuter families—and significant numbers of Irish Catholic immigrants drawn by opportunities to work as laborers and servants. In Brookline the poor were segregated but not excluded altogether, as they would be from twentieth-century elite suburbs. A half century later, a distinct suburban way of life developed that combined rural activities with urban pastimes, and a political consensus emerged that sought efficient government and large expenditures on education and public works. Brookline had created the template for the concept of suburbia, not just in wealthy communities but in the less affluent communities of postwar America.
The event will take place on Wednesday, May 1, from 6 to 7:30.
Lincoln and Booth and Boston (episode 128)
Apr 14, 2019
This episode is being released on April 14, 2019, which means that Abraham Lincoln was shot 154 years ago today. That’s why we’re talking about the links between the Lincoln assassination and the city of Boston. President Lincoln, his assassin John Wilkes Booth, and Boston Corbett, the man who killed Booth, all had transformative experiences in Boston.
Given the connection to the theater in this week’s episode, our pick for the Boston Book Club is Banned in Boston: The Watch and Ward Society’s Crusade against Books, Burlesque, and the Social Evil.
In 1878, the New England Society for the Suppression of Vice was founded by a meeting of Boston residents following a speech given by Anthony Comstock. Comstock was the founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. He made it his mission to fight the social ills of society. The meeting was attended by more than 400 white, upper class men who elected a committee of eight of their peers to run the organization. Women, who were excluded from the organization, would be forced to combat social ills through endeavors such as founding settlement houses, running orphanages, and pioneering the concept of social justice.
The society’s membership required a minimum contribution of $5 or more, equivalent to about $150 today. It held its first annual meeting in Park Street Church in 1879. In 1891, it was renamed the Watch and Ward Society because its members were watching for and warding off evil. At that time there were four social evils that they were watchin’ for– gambling, liquor, fancy ladies, and obscenity. Over the decades, the Society policed the theater so aggressively that many productions were forced to stage watered down Boston versions.
Here’s how Amazon describes the book:
Banned in Boston is the first-ever history of the Watch and Ward Society–once Boston’s unofficial moral guardian. An influential watchdog organization, bankrolled by society’s upper crust, it actively suppressed vices like gambling and prostitution, and oversaw the mass censorship of books and plays. A spectacular romp through the Puritan City, here Neil Miller relates the scintillating story of how a powerful band of Brahmin moral crusaders helped make Boston the most straitlaced city in America, forever linked with the infamous catchphrase “banned in Boston.”
And for our upcoming event this week, we have a book talk at the North End branch of the Boston Public Library on April 24. When the Watch and Ward society went looking for scandalous behavior to ban, they could usually find it in Scollay Square. The Old Howard Theater had started out as the headquarters of an apocalyptic group of Millerite Christians who believed the world would end in October of 1844. When 1844 came and went without a rapture, the building was repurposed for everything from vaudeville to Shakespeare. Among the many thespians to grace the Old Howard’s stage was the famous Shakespearean actor Junius Brutus Booth, who portrayed Hamlet there, and his much more famous son Edwin Booth, who played Macbeth, Richard III, Hamlet, and other roles on the Howard’s stage. You can hear a lot more about the Booths in this week’s show.
Before it was bulldozed in the 1960s and replaced by the decidedly blander Government Center, Scollay Square was home to everything from boxing matches to burlesque shows to bordellos. By that time, even the Old Howard had gotten down at the elbows. Its fate was sealed when vice squad detectives snuck a movie camera into the theater one night in 1953 and captured a dancer doing an illegal striptease. Author David Kruh will be discussing his book Always Something Doing: Boston’s Infamous Scollay Square. Here’s how the library describes the event:
Learn about the Square’s pre-Colonial origins through its heyday as an entertainment mecca, to its current incarnation as City Hall Plaza. Visit the Old Howard Theater, Crawford House, and Joe & Nemo’s hot dog stand and relive the days when vaudevillians, slapstick comedians, and strip teasers ruled the Square.
The Boston Marathon was first run in April of 1897, after Bostonians were inspired by the revival of the marathon for the 1896 Summer Olympics in Athens. It is the oldest continuously running marathon, arguably the most prestigious, and the second longest continuously running footrace in North America, having debuted five months after the Buffalo Turkey Trot. Women were not allowed to officially enter the Boston Marathon until 1972. In 1966, Bobbi Gibb became the first woman to run the Boston Marathon. In 1967, Kathrine Switzer, who had registered as “K. V. Switzer”, became the first woman to run and finish with a race number – despite the race director’s best efforts.
A 1967 Boston Globe editorial in favor of letting women join the race officially.
Boston Book Club
(rodgers book carousel)
We have two recommendations for the Boston Book Club this week. One of which is a book that’s deeply tied to this week’s show, but we haven’t read, and the other of which is only tangentially connected to the show, but we’ve both read and enjoyed it.
Bill Rodgers, known for decades as Boston Billy, is synonymous with the Boston Marathon in many minds. Starting in 1973, he came out of nowhere and started racking up marathon victories, including four at Boston and four in New York. After retiring from competition, he ran a running store at Faneuil Hall called the Bill Rodgers Running Center, and at 72 he is still a fixture at races around the region, sometimes providing commentary or simply signing books, and sometimes running races for charity.
The book Marathon Man is the story of his rise to glory in the years leading up to his first win in Boston. He describes his early love of running and the good fortune that allowed him to train with some of the best runners in the world. Many of his tales are familiar for anyone who runs in Boston. He describes his first round of serious marathon training in 1973, when he lived in Jamaica Plain and tried to log at least 20 miles every day. Most of those miles were a steady grind on the short loop around Jamaica pond.
On the first day of this routine, he logged 13 miles of endless laps around the pond in the afternoon, another six miles after dinner, then describes getting out of bed just before midnight to run one more mile to be able to meet his goal before the day’s official end. For Rodgers, the challenge wasn’t running 20 miles, it was crossing the Jamaicaway. He describes his trepidation at crossing four lanes of the Jamaicaway while dodging Boston drivers hopped up on Dunkin Donuts coffee.
For Marathon fans, the highlight of the book will likely be his detailed memories of his first Boston victory in 1975, and the joy and exuberance in running that ooze out on every page.
(gibb book carousel)
Bobbi Gibb has a book that, although neither of us has read it yet, sounds similar in spirit to the Rodgers book. Called Wind in the Fire, it’s a volume of memoir focused on her training and inspiration in becoming the first woman to finish the Boston marathon. On the flyleaf, she says:
The Wind in the Fire is the recounting of the two years, from the time I first saw the Boston Marathon and fell in love with it in 1964 to the time I became the first woman to ever run the Boston Marathon in 1966. During that time I trained and followed my spiritual path. This is the story of that journey.
Upcoming Event
On the weekend of May 18th and 19th, Historic Newton is hosting their 37th annual house tour. For a single admission fee, you’ll get access to tour six historic homes in one of the oldest towns in the Commonwealth, most of which are private residences that aren’t usually open to the public. The event promises both a glimpse into local history and a dab of inspiration for your own home renovation projects. Tickets for the house tour are $35, and advance registration is strongly recommended.
The house tour is one of Historic Newton’s major fundraisers for the year, and it includes a special bonus event. On the evening of May 18, you can join their Preview Partyfor cocktails and appetizers hosted at a historic private home, which they describe as:
ONE OF NEWTON’S BEST EXAMPLES OF CRAFTSMAN STYLE ARCHITECTURE, [the home] has been residence to a state legislator, a theater owner, a restaurateur, plus Brandeis University’s founder and two of its presidents. Guests who have visited include Eleanor Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, the Dalai Lama, Leonard Bernstein, Marc Chagall, Ralph Bunche, Marian Anderson, Golda Meir and Earl Warren.
In 1919 the house was a target of an anarchist bombing linked to a group associated with Sacco and Vanzetti. This spring will mark the incident’s 100th anniversary.
Graciously restored, stewarded, and preserved for over a century, 66 Beaumont is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Our hosts have updated the home with a nod to the past that enables guests to appreciate its historical significance.
Now, the preview party does require a significant additional contribution to Historic Newton, but it sounds like a fantastic event, with historical ties to events we’ve covered on the podcast in the past.
The Museum Heist (episode 126)
Mar 31, 2019
It’s probably a familiar tale… Late at night, after the museum is closed, a man talks the guard into unlocking the door. Once inside, he pulls out a gun, and within seconds, the guard is tied up and blindfolded, while a gang roams through the museum, picking out rare masterpieces. By the time the guard gets himself free and calls the police, the gang has made off with millions of dollars in stolen artworks, in a case considered the largest art heist in US history. Yes, the tale may sound familiar, but we’re not talking about the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum case, we’re talking about a different art heist, one that was carried out 17 years earlier and across the river in Cambridge. This is the story of the Fogg Museum coin heist.
Private detectives charged with assault and other felonies for beating, macing, and pistol whipping a witness in the case, leaving him permanently disabled.
Additional thefts of artifacts from the Fogg Museum earlier in 1973, in 1974, 1979, and 2004. (There are MORE out there, too!)
Boston Book Club
Our pick for the Boston Book Club this week is… a puzzle! It’s called “The City of Boston History Over Time 4D Cityscape Time Puzzle.”
There are three elements to this puzzle. The first layer is a traditional jigsaw puzzle. The picture is an 1842 map of Boston, which focuses mostly on the Shawmut Peninsula and Boston Neck, with narrow strips of Charlestown and Cambridge across the Charles River. It’s reasonably challenging. There are big swaths of water in the Charles and the Harbor that are hard to distinguish, and the street grid is hard to figure out, until you really focus on the streets that are labelled.
Once you get 1842 put together, you aren’t done. There’s a whole second layer of puzzle waiting for you. The next layer isn’t like any puzzle I’ve done before. It’s a modern map of Boston printed on a thick foam rubber backing. As you put it together, it sits over the 1842 map, but there are cutouts for any areas that are water on both maps. This one seems hard at first, because there are so many tiny, unlabeled streets. But once you figure out that you have both regular border pieces to pull out and the interior borders along the waterways, things start to get a bit easier. When it’s all together, it slides on and off the 1842 map, for easy comparison.
The last piece of the puzzle (see what we did there?) is a set of plastic models of notable modern and historic buildings in Boston. There are precut holes in the modern map for the buildings to sit in, finally giving you that fourth dimension.
The folks over at the Boston Book Blog tipped us off to this cool puzzle, and we bought ours from I AM Books in the North End. They’re out of stock as of the release of this episode, but they should have more in stock soon. In the meantime, I guess you could get a copy from Amazon.
Upcoming Event
This week, we have a book talk at the Massachusetts Historical Society on April 17. Yale professor Mark Peterson will be discussing his new book The City-State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power, 1630-1865. Peterson specializes in the history of early North America and the Atlantic world. The book is an exploration of Boston’s unique identity as an autonomous town that functioned almost as a nation of its own, long before the creation of the United States of America, and also how that identity was lost.
Here’s how the MHS website describes the event:
In the vaunted annals of America’s founding, Boston has long been held up as an exemplary “city upon a hill” and the “cradle of liberty” for an independent United States. Wresting this iconic urban center from these misleading, tired clichés, Mark Peterson highlights Boston’s overlooked past as an autonomous city-state, and in doing so, offers a path-breaking and brilliant new history of early America.
The event begins at 6pm on Wednesday, April 17, with a reception at 5:30. Pre-registration is required, and there’s a $10 fee, unless you’re an MHS member or an EBT cardholder.
The Little Glass Treasure House (episode 125)
Mar 24, 2019
Artist and author Julia Glatfelter joins us this week to discuss her upcoming children’s book The Little Glass Treasure House. The Children’s Art Centre was incorporated in 1914 under the direction of FitzRoy Carrington, curator of prints at the Museum of Fine Arts. When the building was completed in 1918 on Rutland Street in Boston’s South End, it became the first art museum for children in the world. In 1959, the organization merged with 4 settlement houses to become United South End Settlements (USES). Julia taught at the Children’s Art Centre as part of the vacation arts program at USES in 2017, and during that time, she researched the history of the building, the evolution of its programs, and the people who brought the space to life. Her new book, The Little Glass Treasure House, narrates this story through the eyes of Charlotte Dempsey, who directed the center from 1930 to 1971.
A book launch and reception will be held at the South End branch of the BPL on Tuesday, April 2, at 6:30pm
Julia will be selling her book at the South End Authors’ Book Festival on Thursday, April 4, from 4-8pm at the Harry Dow Community Room, Tent City, 130 Dartmouth Street.
Renowned artist Allan Rohan Crite got his start at the Children’s Art Centre. Today, his pieces are in the collections of major museums such as the MFA, the Smithsonian, and MOMA. His works in the Boston Athenaeum collection can be viewed here. In a History Makers interview, he describes his artistic upbringing.
Boston Book Club
Our pick for the Boston Book Club this week is The Rascal King: The Life And Times Of James Michael Curley by Jack Beatty.
One of the most colorful figures in Massachusetts politics in the first half of the 20th century, Curley served four terms as Democratic Mayor of Boston, Massachusetts, including part of one while in prison. He served a single term as Governor of Massachusetts, characterized by Beatty as “a disaster mitigated only by moments of farce” for his free spending and corruption. He also served 2 terms in the US House of Representatives and 1 term in the state House of Representatives.
According to the Harvard Crimson:
In his debut, Curley swept the city with a wave of reform that left his critics gasping. He built schools, playgrounds and beaches; he hired new doctors for the city hospital; he extended the transit systems and pulled down old elevated lines, making thousands of jobs. When the banks in Boston refused to lend him money for this spending spree, he bolted traditions and borrowed from banks all over the country.
Of course, he was collecting graft, raising taxes, and lining his pockets every step of the way.
Upcoming Event
For our upcoming event this week, we’re featuring William Dawes’ Secret,a talk by JL Bell. The event is described as such:
William Dawes, Jr., is known today only as the other rider who carried news of the British army march to Lexington in April 1775. Like the more famous Paul Revere, Dawes was deeply involved in the Patriot movement for years before and after that date. This talk reveals Dawes the militia organizer, the fashion icon, even the arms smuggler whose secret mission for the Patriots’ Committee of Safety helped bring on the Revolutionary War.
The speaker will be J. L. Bell, who is the author of The Road to Concord: How Four Stolen Cannon Ignited the Revolutionary War. He maintains the Boston1775.net website, offering daily helpings of history, analysis, and unabashed gossip about Revolutionary New England.
The talk will be held at the First Church in Roxbury on Sunday, April 7, from 2 to 4pm.
This event is co-sponsored by the Roxbury Historical Society, the Unitarian Universalist Urban Ministry and the JPHS. It is free and open to the public.
BPL Bonus Episode: Grand Peace Jubilee
Mar 22, 2019
Join us at the Boston Public Library to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Grand National Peace Jubilee held in Copley Square in 1869. The Peace Jubilee was a week-long musical celebration of the Union victory in the Civil War. It was a concert of unprecedented scale, performed before an audience of up to 50,000 in a purpose-built Coliseum in the Back Bay that was one of the largest buildings in the world. People came from far and wide to take in the spectacle, including President Ulysses S Grant and many other dignitaries. The climax of the show was a piece by Verdi called the Anvil Chorus. Jubilee director Patrick Gilmore conducted 10,000 vocalists, who were backed by 1000 instrumentalists, a battery of cannons, a convocation of church bells, a custom made bass drum eight feet in diameter, the world’s largest pipe organ, and a company of 100 Boston firefighters carrying sledgehammers and pounding anvils in unison.
To help celebrate the 150th anniversary of this musical spectacular, the Associates of the Boston Public Library are throwing a party at the Copley branch of the BPL on March 29. Nikki and I will be giving a brief talk discussing who Patrick Gilmore was, how he conceived of the enormous Coliseum where the Jubilee was held, and what the concert was like. Boston’s poet laureate Porsha Olayiwola will give a reading, and the keynote address will be delivered by Theodore C. Landsmark. The highlight of the evening will be a musical performance by a brass band from the New England Conservatory of Music, featuring some of the same arrangements that were performed in 1869, complete with firemen hammering anvils.
If you’d like to join us at the BPL on Friday, March 29, make sure to pre-register. The event is free, but you have to pre-register to get in. Doors open at 7pm, and the program begins at 7:30. There will be a cash bar.
Our description of the Grand Peace Jubilee originally aired as episode 102.
Weird Neighborhood History (episode 124)
Mar 17, 2019
Instead of writing and recording a new episode, your humble hosts are going to History Camp this weekend. We’ll leave you with two stories about Boston’s weird neighborhood history from our back catalog. We’ll be sharing a story from Jamaica Plain about a politically motivated crime in the early 20th century that led to a series of running gunfights between the police and what the newspapers called “desperadoes.” Then, we’re going to move across town to Brighton, which — speaking of desperadoes — used to be home to saloons, card games, and hard drinking cowboys, when it hosted New England’s largest cattle market.
Treasure of the Caribbean: the Legend of Governor’s Gold (episode 123)
Mar 10, 2019
Sir William Phips was the first royal governor of Massachusetts under the charter of William and Mary. As governor, he would implement the notorious Court of Oyer and Terminer that led to the executions of 20 innocent people during the Salem witch hysteria. But long before he was a royal governor, he was a poor shepherd boy in rural Maine, who dreamed of Spanish gold. Eventually, he made that dream a reality, leading one of the most successful treasure hunts in history and amassing one of the continent’s greatest fortunes.
The Ursuline Convent Riot, revisited (episode 122)
Mar 03, 2019
This week we’re discussing the riots and destruction of Charlestown’s Ursuline convent, which we first covered back in January 2017. This episode touches on themes of xenophobia, anti-immigrant prejudice, and religious intolerance - lessons we can all learn from today. On a hot summer's night in 1834, rumors swirled around a Catholic girls' school in Charlestown. Catholicism was a frightening, unfamiliar religion, and Catholic immigrants were viewed with great suspicion. People said that the nuns were being held in slavery, or that Protestant children were being tortured and forcibly converted. A crowd gathered, and violence flared. When the sun rose the next morning, the Ursuline Convent lay in smoking ruins. Thirteen men were tried, but none served time. What deep seated biases led Yankee Boston down this dark road? Listen to this week's episode to find out!
"The Birth of a Nation" in Boston (episode 121)
Feb 24, 2019
"The Birth of a Nation" was one of the most controversial movies ever made, and when it premiered on February 8, 1915 it almost instantly became the greatest blockbuster of the silent movie era. It featured innovative new filmmaking techniques, a revolutionary score, and it was anchored by thrilling action scenes shot on a never-before-seen scale, with thousands of actors and extras, hundreds of horses, and battlefield effects like real cannons.
“Birth of a Nation” was apologetically racist, promoting white supremacy and glorifying the Ku Klux Klan as the noble, heroic saviors of white America from the villainous clutches of evil black men bent on rape and destruction. Upon the film’s 50th anniversary in 1965, NAACP president Roy Wilkins proclaimed that all the progress that African Americans had made over the past half century couldn't outweigh the damage done by "Birth of a Nation."
When the film debuted in Boston in April of 1915, audience reaction was split along racial lines, with white Bostonians flocking to see the movie in record numbers, while black Bostonians organized protests and boycotts, with leaders like William Monroe Trotter attempting to have it banned in Boston.
Lewis Latimer, Master Inventor (episode 120)
Feb 18, 2019
African American inventor and draftsman Lewis Latimer’s parents self-emancipated to give their children the opportunities afforded to those born into freedom. A Chelsea native, Latimer’s career took him from the Navy, to a patent law firm, to the prestigious circle of Thomas Edison’s pioneers.
Apocalypse on Boston Bay (episode 119)
Feb 10, 2019
In the years immediately before English Puritans settled on the Shawmut Peninsula, a series of epidemics nearly wiped out the indigenous population of New England. The worst of these plagues was centered on Boston Harbor, and swept from Narragansett Bay in the south to the Penobscot River in the North. It was the greatest tragedy to befall Native peoples of the region, who sometimes referred to it as “the Great Dying,” while English settlers called it a “wonderful plague” or a “prodigious pestilence.” They believed the disease had been sent by God to purge the native inhabitants of the continent and make way for his chosen people.
This week’s show revisits three classic episodes about disasters in Boston history. We’ll start with episode 21, which spotlighted the 1897 subway explosion on Tremont Street. Episode 39 discusses the tragedy at the Cocoanut Grove, followed by episode 91 on the collapse of the Pickwick nightclub. They key takeaway this week? We should all be thankful for modern building codes, safety measures, and government oversight.
David Walker's Radical Appeal (episode 117)
Jan 27, 2019
David Walker was one of America’s first radical abolitionists, a free African American man who moved to Boston in 1824 to escape the danger and humiliations of life in the slave states. He became a prominent member of Black society in Boston before writing and distributing An Appeal to the Colored People of the World. This radical work called for the immediate abolition of slavery, and even advocated violence against whites to bring about emancipation. At the time, few white leaders were talking openly about ending slavery, and those who were favored gradual emancipation. Frederick Douglass would later say that the book “startled the land like a trump of coming judgement,” and it shook the slaveowning society of the white South to the core.
Horace Mann, Education Innovator (episode 116)
Jan 20, 2019
Boston has always been a city that valued education, and few people did as much to improve our educational system as Horace Mann. He started from modest means, living out the one-liner in Good Will Hunting about getting a $150,000 education for $1.50 in late fees at the library. Mann served as a tutor and a librarian before being elected to the Massachusetts legislature. It was, however, as the Commonwealth’s first Secretary of Education that Horace Mann transformed education in Massachusetts by fundamentally reforming how our teachers are trained. His method would eventually be adopted by much of the country. You’re welcome!
Crossing the River Charles (episode 115)
Jan 13, 2019
What do you know about the earliest crossings over the Charles River in Boston? When it was founded, the town of Boston occupied the tip of the narrow Shawmut Peninsula, with the harbor on one side and the Charles RIver on the other. Residents relied first on ferries, and later on a series of bridges to connect them with the surrounding towns and countryside. The progression of bridge construction illustrates not only the state of construction technology, but also the birth of corporations in America and a landmark Supreme Court case defining the limits of private property rights.
Although Cotton Mather is best known for his role in the Salem Witch Trials, he also pioneered smallpox inoculation in North America. This week, you’ll hear about Boston’s history with smallpox, including multiple epidemics, the controversy surrounding Mather’s inoculation movement, and the final outbreak in the 20th century. We first covered this topic way back in Episode 2, but these days we’re better at researching, writing, and recording, so this episode should be a step up.
With New Year’s Eve comes the ball drop in Times Square at the stroke of midnight. But in the late 1800s, Boston dropped a ball every day to mark the stroke of noon, because telling the time was serious business. The time ball, along with telegraphic signals and fire alarm bells, announced the exact time to the public, at a time when the exact time was critical to navigation on the high seas and safety on the newfangled railroads. With ultra-precise clocks made by local jewelers and true astronomical time announced daily by the Harvard Observatory, Boston Standard Time became the de facto standard for a wide swath of the country long before time zones were officially proposed and adopted.
Boston abolitionists rallied in response to the Fugitive Slave Act, ushering in an era of more active resistance that we chronicled in episodes 15-17. This week, we’re spotlighting the role that Theodore Parker, a radically liberal Unitarian minister, played in securing the safety of self-emancipated African Americans and inciting the city to oppose slavery with violence if necessary.
When Boston Invented Playgrounds (episode 111)
Dec 16, 2018
In the late 19th century, a new revolution in play was born in Boston. In an era when urban children had few spaces to play except in the alleys and courtyards around their tenements, and child labor meant that many kids had no opportunities to play at all, an immigrant doctor inspired a Boston women’s group to take up the topic of play. From its humble beginnings in a single sandpile in the North End, the playground movement grew to a quasi-scientific pursuit, until it was finally adopted as a national goal. By the early 20th century, safe playgrounds with structured, supervised play were seen as vital to children’s moral and educational development.
This week we’re digging into our archives to bring you discussions of three Bostonian ladies who forged new paths for women. Katherine Nanny Naylor was granted the first divorce in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, allowing her to ditch an abusive husband and make her way as an entrepreneur. Annette Kellerman was a professional swimmer who popularized the one-piece swimming suit and made a (sometimes literal) splash in vaudeville and silent films. And Amelia Earhart took to the skies after humble beginnings as a social worker in a Boston settlement house.
Bohemian Boston’s Gay Grampa (episode 109)
Dec 03, 2018
Prescott Townsend was a classic Boston Brahmin. He was born into Boston’s elite in 1894, graduated from Harvard, and served in World War I. All signs pointed to a very conventional path through life, but Townsend’s trajectory would take him far from the arc followed by his contemporaries from the Cabot, Lowell, or Adams families. Instead, Prescott Townsend would be active in radical theater, experimental architecture, and, surprisingly late in his life, he would help found the American gay liberation movement and lead the first Pride parade in 1970.
Mary Dyer, the Quaker Martyr (episode 108)
Nov 26, 2018
Mary Dyer was an early Puritan settler of Boston. Born in England, Mary moved to Boston in 1635 and was soon drawn to the Quaker religion, in part because of the opportunities it afforded women to learn and lead. New laws forbade her from professing her faith publicly. Not one to back down, Mary was arrested and banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony several times before finally being hanged on Boston Neck, becoming one of our city’s four Quaker martyrs. Today, a statue of Mary Dyer stands in front of the State House, just to the right of the Hooker entrance.
Harvard’s Thanksgiving Day Riot (episode 107)
Nov 19, 2018
When it comes to Boston history, it seems like there’s a riot for every possible season. It’s Thanksgiving season now, so this week we’re going to discuss a riot that took place at Harvard University… not during the tumultuous anti-war protests of the 1960s or 1970s, but on Thanksgiving day in 1787. There’s tantalizingly little in the historical record about what happened or how it started, but we know that some very famous historical figures were right in the middle of the action.
Miss Mac, from Wellesley to the WAVES (episode 106)
Nov 11, 2018
In honor of Veterans Day, we’re talking about the women who served in World War II in a Navy outfit called the WAVES. Specifically, their commanding officer, Mildred McAfee (later Mildred McAfee Horton). When the war started, she was president of Wellesley College, but before it was over, she would be the first woman to become a commissioned officer in the US Navy, commanding a force of nearly 100,000 people.
Emma Snodgrass defied the gender roles of the 1850s, getting arrested multiple times in Boston for appearing in public unchaperoned and dressed as a man. Was she a troublemaker looking for thrills? Was she trying to pass as a man in order to find work and independence in a society with few opportunities for women? Or was she a trans person in an era that didn’t yet have words to describe that concept? Unfortunately, the historic record leaves us with just as many questions as answers.
In 1928, researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital demonstrated a groundbreaking medical advancement – the iron lung. Prior to the arrival of the polio vaccination in 1955, the deadly disease was the most feared illness in America. With this invention by two Harvard faculty members, the diaphragm paralysis that accompanied polio no longer had to be a death sentence.
In this week’s show, we are talking about all things Joseph Warren. Author Christopher di Spigna joins us to discuss his book Founding Martyr: The Life and Death of Dr. Joseph Warren, the American Revolution’s Lost Hero, a new biography of our favorite patriot. We’ll start with his boyhood in a Roxbury filled with farms and apple orchards, then cover his education at Harvard, his rise in politics, his untimely death at the start of the revolution, and the recent discovery of living descendants.
In 1869, an eccentric entrepreneur and musical visionary built one of the largest buildings in 19th Century Boston. It was a concert hall with twice the capacity of the modern TD garden, and it was built to house the largest musical spectacular the world had ever seen up to that point. It was the Boston Coliseum, built to house the Grand National Peace Jubilee celebrating the end of America’s Civil War.
Show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/102
Riot Classics (episode 101)
Oct 07, 2018
For this week’s show, we’re revisiting three highlights from Boston’s long and storied history of rioting. We’ll include stories from past episodes covering the 1919 Boston police strike, 1747 impressment riots, and the 1837 Broad Street riot.
Listen to the end to find out how you can get some free HUB History swag in celebration of our 100th episode!
The Occupation of Boston (episode 100)
Sep 30, 2018
250 years ago this week, British troops landed in Boston. Author J.L. Bell joins us to discuss the British government's decision to send troops in an attempt to keep peace after Boston's years of upheaval. Instead of bringing peace, the tense occupation would culminate in the Boston Massacre less than two years later.
Listen to the end to find out how you can get some free HUB History swag in celebration of our 100th episode!
Brighton is one of our westernmost neighborhoods, and it’s often associated with Boston’s large and sometimes unruly student population, but in the mid 19th century, Brighton was home to all the elements of a western movie. There were cattle drives, stockyards, saloons, and stampedes through the streets. Before it was tamed, unruly Brighton was our own wild west.
Margaret Sanger, Uncensored (episode 98)
Sep 17, 2018
This week, we’re discussing Margaret Sanger’s thwarted attempt to present a lecture on birth control to the good citizens of Boston in April of 1929. The 1920s were a fairly liberating time for women – women were voting, drinking alcohol socially, cutting their hair short, and dancing the Charleston in short dresses. However, Boston was slow to let its hair down under the stern gaze of the Watch and Ward Society, and birth control remained one of the ultimate taboos.
Hunting the King Killers (episode 97)
Sep 09, 2018
This week, we tell a story from very early in Boston’s history, a story partly shrouded in legend. The cast of characters includes everyone from Increase Mather to Nathaniel Hawthorne, encompassing two kings, two continents, two colonies, and Royal governors Endecott, Andros, and Hutchinson. It is the story of two judges who signed the death warrant for a king, famously known as the regicides, or king killers. Edward Whalley and William Goffe became celebrities in Boston, before being forced to flee in the face of what one historian called "the greatest manhunt in British history."
September 1918, with Skip Desjardin (episode 96)
Sep 02, 2018
This week, author Skip Desjardin tells us about his new book September 1918: War, Plague, and the World Series. He introduces us to a pivotal month, when world history was being made in Boston and Bostonians were making history around the world. The cast of characters ranges from Babe Ruth to Blackjack Pershing to EE Cummings. During our discussion, you’ll learn about the Massachusetts National Guardsmen who fought the first American-led battle in World War I, you’ll hear about the uncertainty surrounding the 1918 World Series, and you’ll encounter more details about the deadly 1918 influenza outbreak.
On August 27, 1918 Boston became acquainted with the epidemic that has gone down in history as the “Spanish flu.” A more accurate name for this disease outbreak might be the “Boston flu,” because our city is where this influenza variant mutated and first turned truly deadly. The first cases of this new and deadly disease were reported in South Boston 100 years ago this week. Soon, Boston would suffer nearly a thousand deaths per week as the disease peaked. Before it was over, up to 20% of the world’s population would be infected. With up to 100 million people killed, the 1918 flu was the most deadly disease in human history.
Amelia Earhart in Boston (episode 94)
Aug 19, 2018
You probably know about Amelia Earhart’s famous career as a groundbreaking aviator, and you almost certainly know about her famous disappearance over the Pacific. But you may not know about Amelia Earhart’s first career as a social worker in one of Boston’s many settlement houses. This week, we discuss her early exposure to aviation, the famed Friendship crossing, and also her reflections on her career of service to newly immigrated Americans.
Folk Magic and Mysteries at the Fairbanks House (episode 93)
Aug 13, 2018
In this episode, we're joined by the curator of one of the oldest houses in North America. He'll tell us about evidence that's been uncovered that generations of residents may have believed in an ancient form of countermagic. The inhabitants of Dedham’s Fairbanks House used charms and hex marks deriving from Puritan, Catholic, and pagan religious traditions in an attempt to ward off evil forces that might have included witches, demons, and even disease. Fairbanks House Museum curator Daniel Neff will be joining us in just a few minutes to explain the evidence he’s found and what it can tell us about the Fairbanks family and the world they lived in.
Correction: call 781-326-1170 to book a ghost tour.
Bullets on the Boardwalk (episode 92)
Aug 06, 2018
On August 8, 1920, an epic brawl broke out on Revere Beach when police attempted to arrest a group of four disorderly sailors. In the chaos that followed, 400 sailors attempted to storm the police station to free their comrades, even stealing rifles from the beachfront shooting galleries and turning them against the police. Soldiers from nearby Fort Banks had to be called out to restore order at the point of a bayonet. It was the height of Revere Beach’s early 20th century popularity, when it was seen as Boston’s Coney Island, with roller coasters, restaurants, and dance halls lining the beach just north of the city.
Boston’s Pickwick Disaster and the Dance of Death (episode 91)
Jul 29, 2018
On the evening of July 3, 1925, Boston's Pickwick nightclub collapsed while couples packed the dance floor. Dozens were trapped in the rubble, while firefighters, police, and laborers worked desperately to free them. In the end, 44 people were killed and many more were injured. A rumor circulated that the disaster had been caused by a popular dance called the Charleston. This fake news soon became one of the most viral stories of the newspaper era, causing many cities to ban couples from dancing the Charleston. This week’s show has it all… dirty dancing, illegal speakeasies, and a heroic rescue effort.
For many people, summertime in Boston means canoeing, kayaking, paddle boarding, fishing, and even swimming in the rivers that run through and around our city. To celebrate the season this week we’re coming three classic episodes about industry, adventure, and romance on the water. We’ll hear about the nearly 400 year history of corn, cotton, and condos on the Mother Brook; some late-nineteenth century fake news about Vikings on the Charles; and the early 20th century canoe craze that drove the state police to ban kissing in canoes on the Charles River. Listen now!
Boston's Barons of the Sea (episode 89)
Jul 16, 2018
In this week’s episode, we sit down with author Steven Ujifusa to discuss his new book “Barons of the Sea, and their race to build the world’s fastest clipper ship,” which will be out this Tuesday, July 17. Steven will tell us about 19th century drug smuggling, what it meant to trade for tea in China or gold in California, and why America’s most prominent families were involved in the shipping business. Most of all, he’ll tell us about the East Boston shipyard where Donald McKay built the fastest, most graceful ships the world had ever seen.
The Wreck of the Mary O'Hara (episode 88)
Jul 09, 2018
In January 1941, the two masted fishing schooner Mary O’Hara collided with a barge in Boston Harbor. At least 18 sailors died in the ice cold waters of Boston Harbor, while they were almost in sight of their own homes. Only five members of the crew managed to cling to the exposed mast for hours until help arrived. At the time, headlines called it Boston Harbor’s worst disaster.
The Charles River Esplanade (episode 87)
Jul 02, 2018
This week, over a half a million people from near and far will flock to the banks of the Charles River to celebrate our nation’s Independence Day. Why did Boston decide to create new land dedicated to recreation along the river, and how did some of that land end up being used for a highway instead? The story begins with the Storrow family. Listen now!
In this week's episode, we use three classic episodes to turn the Trump administration's anti-immigrant rhetoric on its head. The President teaches us to be afraid of Central American and Middle Eastern immigrants and asylum seekers because of terrorism, crime, and an unfamiliar religion. Our ancestors had these same fears about earlier immigrant groups, groups that are today considered part of the fabric of America. In their day, Italian Americans were suspected of terrorism, Chinese Americans were blamed for organized crime, and Irish Americans were feared because of their unfamiliar and potentially dangerous religion.
When Darkness Veiled the Sky (episode 85)
Jun 18, 2018
This week’s show relates three incidents across three centuries when daytime turned to darkness in the skies over Boston. They weren’t solar eclipses. Instead, they were a different natural phenomenon, one that was completely unpredictable and each time led to speculation that the end of the world was at hand.
The Broad Street Riot of 1837 was one of Boston's many historical melees. This one took place when a company of Yankee firefighters ran into an Irish funeral. Despite our reputation as a coastal liberal enclave, Boston has a history of hostility towards newcomers. When Irish immigrants began arriving in our harbor en masse, Yankee nativists welcomed them with violence and prejudice. Before long, a funeral procession in the wrong place at the wrong time led to a brawl with well over 10,000 participants and onlookers.
It's Pride Week in Boston, so we're bringing you the story of Boston's first Pride parade. While most early Pride celebrations were joyous occasions, Boston's 1971 Pride parade was a protest march. Inspired by Stonewall, activists confronted representatives of religion, policing, and government.
Bathing Beauty Baffles Bashful Boston (episode 82)
May 28, 2018
We’re taking you to the beach for Memorial Day weekend. 111 years ago, champion swimmer Annette Kellerman was arrested on Revere Beach. Her crime? Appearing in public in a one piece bathing suit of her own design. Along with being a record setting swimmer, Kellerman was a fitness and wellness guru, a vaudeville producer, movie actress, and a clothing designer. Besides her athletic prowess, she was known for her physical beauty, appearing in Hollywood’s first nude scene. A Harvard professor would go so far as to claim that he had scientific proof that she was “the most beautifully formed woman of modern times.” Puritanical Boston wasn’t prepared to see the exposed arms of such a specimen, so Kellerman was arrested for indecent exposure.
Meet the Sacred Cod, a five foot long wooden fish, carved and painted to resemble a cod. The mighty cod holds great prominence in Massachusetts history, as cod fishing was the first industry practiced by Europeans in the region. For perhaps 270 years or more, the Sacred Cod has served as a sort of mascot for the state House of Representatives, except for two days in 1933, when it went inexplicably missing.
Arrrr, matey! Nikki and I are running a pirate themed relay race on Cape Cod this weekend instead of recording a new episode, so of course we’re going to play three classic pirate stories this week. The first two clips will highlight the role Boston played in the golden age of piracy, while the third discusses Puritan minister Cotton Mather’s complicated relationship with the pirates whose execution he oversaw. Listen now!
The Battle of Jamaica Plain (episode 79)
May 07, 2018
What started as a simple holdup in a bar in Jamaica Plain in 1908 soon turned into a bloody battle, as a small group of radical anarchists engaged hundreds of Boston Police officers in a series of running gun fights across the neighborhood. The shootouts and a bloody siege at Forest Hills Cemetery left a total of 11 wounded and two dead. Most of the suspects escaped, only to be killed years later by British soldiers on the streets of London under the command of Winston Churchill himself. Listen now!
Boston’s history with gangsters and goons goes far beyond the legacy of Whitey Bulger. This week we’re featuring three stories from our back catalog about very different aspects of organized crime in Boston. We’ll be discussing Charles “King” Solomon’s reign in the South End, the Tong War’s place in Chinatown history, and the Brinks Robbery in the North End, known as the crime of the century.
Show notes:
Tent City (Episode 77)
Apr 22, 2018
50 years ago this week, residents of one Boston neighborhood carried out an act of civil disobedience, bringing attention to the city’s need for affordable housing. A group of mostly African American residents occupied an empty lot where rowhouses once stood. It was Boston’s 1968 Tent City protest, and it helped change how the city approaches development and urban planning.
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Paul Revere's Not-So-Famous Rides (Ep76)
Apr 16, 2018
In honor of Patriots Day and the anniversary of Paul Revere’s famous ride, we are focusing on some of Paul Revere’s less famous rides this week. When Paul Revere set out to warn the Provincial Congress that the British Regulars were coming in April of 1775, it wasn’t his first gig as an express rider for the patriots. For almost three years, he had been carrying messages from the Boston Committee of Correspondence on horseback to patriots in New York, Philadelphia, New Hampshire, and beyond. It’s just that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow didn’t write poems about the other rides.
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Pope's Night, Remastered (Ep75)
Apr 09, 2018
This week, we’re revisiting the bizarre holiday known as Pope’s Night that was celebrated in early Boston. Having evolved out of the British observation of Guy Fawkes Day, Boston took the event to extremes. The virulently anti-Catholic colonists in our town held festive bonfires, parades, and plenty of drinking. Almost every year, the celebration would lead to massive street fights and riots that sometimes turned deadly, all to commemorate a thwarted plot against the British Parliament. Pope’s Night was the subject of our very first podcast, and we’re happy to revisit it here with better research, more practiced storytelling, and hopefully better audio quality.
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Original Sin: The Roots of Slavery in Boston (Ep74)
Apr 02, 2018
The Boston slave trade began when a ship arrived in the harbor in the summer of 1638 carrying a cargo of enslaved Africans, but there was already a history of slave ownership in the new colony. After this early experience, Massachusetts would continue to be a slave owning colony for almost 150 years. In this week’s episode, we discuss the origins of African slavery in Massachusetts and compare the experience of enslaved Africans to other forms of unfree labor in Boston, such as enslaved Native Americans, Scottish prisoners of war, and indentured servants.
Warning: This week’s episode uses some of the racialized language of our 17th and 18th century sources, and it describes an act of sexual violence.
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The Great Molasses Flood, Remastered (Ep73)
Mar 26, 2018
This week we’re revisiting Boston’s great Molasses Flood, the subject of one of our earliest podcasts. We’re giving you an update, now that our technology, research, and storytelling skills have improved. Stay tuned for tales of rum, anarchists, and the speed of molasses in January. It’s not slow!
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Rat Day (Ep72)
Mar 18, 2018
The Boston Women’s Municipal League was a civic organization made up of mostly middle and upper class women, at a time when most women didn’t work outside the home. In 1915, they declared war on rats. Over the next few years, Women's Municipal League published literature on eradicating rats, carried out an extensive education campaign, and in 1917 hosted a city-wide Rat Day with cash prizes for the citizens who killed the most rats.
The Curious Case of Phineas Gage (Ep71)
Mar 12, 2018
In 1848, railroad worker Phineas Gage suffered an unusual injury, in which a three foot tamping iron was blown through his skull, making him on of the greatest medical curiosities of all time. We’ll discuss his time in Boston, his life post-injury, and the impact of his case on modern neuroscience.
Content warning: The details of Gage’s accident and injury are a little gory.
Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968, with Ryan Walsh (Ep70)
Mar 04, 2018
This week, Ryan Walsh joins us to discuss Boston in 1968, the James Brown concert that might have prevented a riot, a cult that took over Roxbury’s Fort Hill, the strange history of LSD in our city, and a musical movement called the Bosstown Sound. Most of all, though, we will discuss his book Astral Weeks, a Secret History of 1968 and the Van Morrison record that inspired it.
Picturing the South End, with Lauren Prescott (Ep69)
Feb 26, 2018
We’re joined this week by Lauren Prescott, the executive director of the South End Historical Society and author of a new book simply titled "Boston’s South End." It’s part of Arcadia Publishing’s “Postcard History Series,” and it features hundreds of images from the South End Historical Society’s collection of historic postcards dating from the 1860s to the mid 20th century.
The Execution that Almost Killed the Death Penalty (Ep68)
Feb 19, 2018
In 1848, a murder case nearly brought an end to the death penalty in Massachusetts. When a young black man named Washington Goode was convicted of first degree murder that year, there hadn’t been an execution in Boston for 13 years. White men who had been convicted of the same crime had their sentences commuted to a life in prison, and tens of thousands of petitions poured in asking the governor to do the same thing for Goode. Yet even so, he was sent to the gallows. Why?
Classics: Boston Resists the Fugitive Slave Act (Ep67)
Feb 11, 2018
We used our studio time this week to record something special that will air next month. Without a new episode, we didn’t want to leave you without any HUB History this week. Instead, here are three classic episodes honoring black and white abolitionists in 19th Century Boston. Recorded last February, in the wake of President Trump’s attempt to implement a “Muslim Ban,” these episodes focus on Boston’s resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act, which was seen as an unjust law.
Cotton Mather REALLY Hated Pirates (Ep66)
Feb 05, 2018
This week, we’re talking about the conflict between Puritans and pirates in the late 1600s and early 1700s. Cotton Mather is remembered for his role in the Salem Witch Trials, but he was the childhood minister to Ben Franklin, ultimate symbol of the American Enlightenment, and he died less than fifty years before our Declaration of Independence was signed. In a way, Mather was one of the last Puritans, and some of his most famous sermons are the ones he wrote for mass executions of pirates. Times were changing, setting up a conflict between rigidly hierarchical Puritan societies and fledgling democracies that could be found on board pirate ships.
For almost two years in the early 1960s, women in Boston lived in fear of a killer who became known as the Boston Strangler. Thirteen women were killed, and the murders were eventually attributed to Albert DeSalvo, based on his confession, details revealed in court during a separate case, and DNA evidence linking him to the last murder victim. It’s been over fifty years since DeSalvo was imprisoned on unrelated charges, leaving many people to question whether he was really the lone killer.
Harvard Indian College: Promises Broken... and Kept (Ep64)
Jan 22, 2018
There's an oft forgotten clause written into Harvard’s 1650 charter promising to educate the Native American youth of Massachusetts. This week's episode looks at the early, mostly unsuccessful efforts to create an Indian College on the Harvard campus, the abandonment of that plan after King Philip’s War soured the English settlers on their earlier plans for Christianizing local Native American tribes, and how modern scholarship is helping to rediscover this legacy and rededicate Harvard to embracing Native Americans.
What did TV character Fox Mulder have in common with John Winthrop, the Puritan founder of Boston? They both recorded strange lights in the sky and other unexplained phenomena in extensive detail. This week, we’re going to explore the close encounters Winthrop described in 1639 and 1644. There were unexplained lights darting around the sky in formation at impossible speeds, ghostly sounds, and witnesses who claimed to have lost time. It’s a scene straight out of the X-Files, except these are considered the first UFO sightings in North America.
Show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/063
Ep62: Ten Paces, Fire! Boston's Hamiltonian Duel
Jan 07, 2018
Early in the morning of March 31, 1806, two young men of Boston faced each other across a marshy field outside Providence, Rhode Island. With the sun beginning to peek above the horizon, they marked out ten paces between themselves, then stood facing one another. Each had a friend at his right hand, as they coolly leveled their pistols at one another. Now, one of the friends called out, “Are you ready… Present… Fire!” And both men squeezed the triggers on their dueling pistols.
If that sounds an awful lot like the famous duel that Alexander Hamilton fought against Aaron Burr two years earlier, you’re not wrong. In ways that we’ll examine, it’s even more similar to the duel that Alexander’s son Philip Hamilton fought against a man named George Eacker in 1801.
Ep61: Annexation, Making Boston Bigger for 150 Years
Dec 31, 2017
In the latter half of the nineteenth century, Boston transformed itself from a town on a tiny peninsula to a sprawling city. In part, this was done by creating new land in the Back Bay and South Boston, but the city gained a great amount of area by annexing its neighbors. The first was Roxbury, which joined the city of Boston 150 years ago this week. Dorchester, Brighton, West Roxbury, and Charlestown would follow. Other towns, like Cambridge and Brookline would not. Find out why in this week’s show.
Ep60: Holidays on the Harbor (Dec 25, 2017)
Dec 25, 2017
If you’ve been listening to the show for a while, you’ll know that the Boston Harbor Islands are one of our favorite local destinations. This week, we’re sharing three stories from the Harbor Islands, all of which originally aired within the first 20 episodes of the podcast. We’ll hear about the zoo shipwreck, a hermit who made her home on the harbor, and the secret Harbor Island base where Nazis were smuggled into the country after World War II.
Ep59: Corn, Cotton, and Condos, 378 Years on the Mother Brook (Dec 18, 2018)
Dec 18, 2017
Everyone knows the Charles River and the Neponset River, but have you ever heard of the Mother Brook? It is America’s first industrial canal, built by Puritan settlers in the earliest days of Massachusetts Bay Colony, and vital to the development of Dorchester, Hyde Park, and Dedham. Plus, by connecting the rivers on either side, it turns the landmass occupied by Newton, Brookline, and most of Boston into an island!
Ep58: Harvard's Human Computers Reach for the Stars (Dec 11, 2017)
Dec 11, 2017
During an era more associated with the Wild West, a group of women in Cambridge made historic advances in the field of astronomy, discovering new stars and fundamental principles about how our universe works. In the beginning, they were treated as menial clerical workers and paid a fraction of what their male counterparts got. Only decades later did they win academic respect, earning advanced degrees and finally the title Professor. They were the Human Computers of the Harvard University Observatory.
Ep57: Boston and Halifax, a Lasting Bond (Dec 4, 2017)
Dec 04, 2017
On December 6, 1917, a munitions ship blew up in Halifax Harbor, causing the largest explosion until the atomic bomb was invented. The city was devastated; thousands were killed and injured. Before the day was over, Boston had loaded a train with doctors, nurses, and supplies. The train raced through the night and through a blizzard to bring relief to the desperate city. Today, Nova Scotia gives Boston a Christmas tree each year as a token of thanks.
Last week's episode got us thinking about serial killers in Boston. In this week's show, we're revisiting two classic episodes about Boston's lesser known serial killers. Meet The Nightmare Nurse and a chilling figure who called himself The Giggler.
Ep55: The Boy Fiend, Boston's Youngest Serial Killer (Nov 20, 2017)
Nov 20, 2017
Jesse Pomeroy was a Victorian era serial killer who stalked the streets of Boston. He predated Jack the Ripper by a decade, and the Boston Strangler by almost a century. At only 14 years old, he was known as the Boy Fiend, a child who tortured and killed his fellow children, becoming Boston’s youngest serial killer.
Ep54: The 1747 Boston Impressment Riot (Nov 13, 2017)
Nov 13, 2017
In 1747, a British Commodore began kidnapping sailors and working men in Boston, and the people of the city wouldn’t stand for it. Three days of violence followed, in a draft riot that pitted the working class of Boston against the Colonial government and Royal Navy.
Ep53: The Radical Heywoods (Nov 5, 2017)
Nov 06, 2017
This week’s show profiles Angela and Ezra Heywood: writers, activists, free-love advocates, suffragists, socialists, labor reformers, and abolitionists who shocked the sensibilities of Victorian Boston.
Ep52: Our Year in Review (Oct 30, 2017)
Oct 30, 2017
We're celebrating our first "podcastversary" with a look back at our favorite episodes so far, some reflections on podcast production, and our plans for switching things up in the year ahead. Stay tuned for the end, where we ask our listeners an important question about the future of the show.
Ep51: Confederates on Boston Harbor (Oct 23, 2017)
Oct 23, 2017
During the Civil War, thousands of Confederate soldiers, diplomats, and politicians were imprisoned behind the walls of Fort Warren on Georges Island. Today, the fort is home to the only Confederate monument in Massachusetts, but not for much longer.
Ep50: The Great Brinks Caper (Oct 16, 2017)
Oct 16, 2017
The Brinks robbery, an infamous 1950 heist in Boston’s North End, captivated the nation and baffled the FBI. It was the largest robbery in American history up to that time.
Ep49: The Tong Wars and the Great Chinatown Raid (Oct 9, 2017)
Oct 09, 2017
This week’s episode takes on the early history of Boston’s Chinatown, two murders that took place there at the turn of the twentieth century, and a terrifying crackdown on Chinese Americans in Boston that sparked an international incident and has parallels in today’s headlines.
This episode examines the life of Walter Dodd, who started his career as a janitor at Harvard Medical School before becoming a pharmacist, physician, and the Father of American Radiology. Though as you will hear, his journey was not without great personal sacrifice.
Ep47: This Week in Boston History (Sep 25, 2017)
Sep 24, 2017
Your humble hosts are out of town and off the air this week. Never fear, Jake is here, and he has this week’s historical anniversaries for your enjoyment.
Episode 46: Aeronauts, Ascents, and the Early History of Ballooning in Boston (Sep 18, 2017)
Sep 17, 2017
Early Boston aeronauts used balloons to perform scientific experiments, cross the English channel, take the first aerial photographs, and provide public entertainment. Whether by hot air or hydrogen, these pioneers made their way into the air, and into the history books.
The Skin Book was written by highwayman George Walton and dedicated to the only man to best him in combat. While he was a prisoner at Charlestown Penitentiary, Walton wrote a memoir. According to his wishes, after his death, the book was bound in Walton’s own skin and given to the man who defeated him. Today, this example of anthropodermic bibliopegy is a prized possession of the Boston Athenaeum.
Ep44: Perambulating the Bounds (Sep 4, 2017)
Sep 03, 2017
Since 1651, Boston has had a legal responsibility to mark and measure its boundaries every few years. Despite advances in technology, the practice of “perambulating the bounds” means that someone has to go out and walk the town lines. This law is one of the oldest still on the books, but when was the last time Boston perambulated its bounds?
Ep43: The Case of the Somnambulist (Aug 28, 2017)
Aug 28, 2017
When young Albert Tirrell killed his lover Maria Bickford on Beacon Hill, it sparked a scandal that rocked Victorian Boston in the 1840s. It was a tale of seduction, murder, and the unlikeliest of defenses. In the end, he would be found not guilty, in the first successful use of sleepwalking as a defense against murder.
We apologize for Nikki’s head cold, some rough cuts that resulted from editing out her sniffles, and the couple of sniffles that made it into the final cut.
Ep42: Boston's Total Eclipse of the Podcast
Aug 20, 2017
Your humble hosts are traveling this week, trying to see the first total eclipse of our lifetimes. While we’re gone, listen to the story of the 1806 eclipse, the first total eclipse seen in Boston after European colonization.
Ep41: Canoes and Canoodling on the Charles River (Aug 14, 2017)
Aug 13, 2017
During a late nineteenth century canoe craze, recreational canoeing became Boston’s hottest leisure time activity. Young lovers took advantage of the privacy and intimacy of a canoe to engage in a little bit of illicit romance, leading a humorless state police agency to ban kissing in canoes on the Charles River.
Ep40: Banned in Boston! (Aug 7, 2017)
Aug 07, 2017
Despite our liberal reputation today, for years Boston was a bastion of official censorship. Authors and playwrights whose works were considered obscene had to create a watered-down “Boston version.” The Watch and Ward Society decided what art, theater, and literature was permissible, and what would be Banned in Boston!
Episode 39: Tragedy at Cocoanut Grove (Jul 31, 2017)
Jul 31, 2017
The 1942 fire at Boston’s Cocoanut Grove nightclub killed a staggering 492 people, making it the deadliest fire in Boston history and one of the deadliest fires in US history. For Boston, it is the deadliest modern disaster of any type. Only the smallpox epidemics of the early 1700s and the 1918 Spanish flu rival it for loss of life.
Episode 38: The Reign of Charles "King" Solomon (Jul 24, 2017)
Jul 23, 2017
This week’s show is about Charles “King” Solomon, also known as Boston Charlie, whose criminal enterprise placed him at the head of organized crime in Boston throughout the prohibition era. He reached influence at the national level, set policies in play that led to tragedy at the Cocoanut Grove, and in death, left a wake that may have led to the rise of Whitey Bulger.
Episode 37: This Week in Boston History (minisode Jul 17, 2017)
Jul 17, 2017
Your humble hosts are out having summertime fun this week. Don’t worry, though… Jake is flying solo this week, and bringing you this week’s historical anniversaries. We’ll be back next week with a real episode.
Episode 36: Boston in the Golden Age of Piracy, Part 2 (Jul 10, 2017)
Jul 10, 2017
In this episode, we continue our tale of Boston in the Golden Age of Piracy, picking up at the end of the War of The Spanish Succession. We’ll learn about some of the most fearsome and notorious pirates in history, as well as one of the most ineffective. We’ll see how one of these pirates gave a founding father his start in public life, which US president’s great grandfather bought a former pirate as a slave, and what other president’s great grandfather decapitated a pirate with an axe.
Episode 35: The Boston Symphony Orchestra in World War I (Jul 3, 2017)
Jul 02, 2017
With a partial “Muslim Ban” in place, it’s important to remember that vilifying “enemy aliens” is one of the darkest chapters of our nation’s history. A hundred years ago, Americans were all too willing to imprison or even deport their neighbors of German descent. Here in Boston, the preeminent director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra was affected, along with almost a third of the orchestra’s musicians.
Episode 34: Boston in the Golden Age of Piracy, part 1 (Jun 26, 2017)
Jun 26, 2017
Shiver me timbers! This is the first in a two-part series about Boston’s role in the Golden Age of Piracy, from 1650 to 1726. A few pirates set sail from our city, some preyed on the shipping coming in and out of our port, and even more met their ends on the gallows in Boston. We’ll hear stories of daring raids and buried treasures, of mutiny, jailbreak, and double crossing.
Episode 33: The Four Burials of Joseph Warren (June 19, 2017)
Jun 19, 2017
Dr. Joseph Warren was the greatest Patriot leader you’ve never heard of. His many accomplishments led the royal governor of Massachusetts, General Thomas Gage, to remark that “The death of Joseph Warren is akin to the death of five hundred Patriots.” He was so in demand that his body was moved three times after his death at the Battle of Bunker Hill.
Episode 32: The Gruesome Tale of the Giggler (June 12, 2017)
Jun 12, 2017
Everyone knows the story of the Boston Strangler. Fewer people know the tale of The Giggler, Boston’s lesser known serial killer. The victims fit no pattern, they were a young boy and girl, a grown man, and an old lady. The Giggler would simply feel what he described as an irresistible urge to kill.
Episode 31: This Week in Boston History (Minisode May 29, 2017)
May 29, 2017
Your humble hosts weren’t able to sit down together and record a full episode this week. However, we wouldn’t want you to have to go a whole week without hearing from us. So here’s a brief look at what happened this week in Boston history.
Episode 30: Resurrection Men, a Brief History of Grave Robbing in Boston (May 22, 2017)
May 22, 2017
Boston, today a city rich with world-class hospitals and medical schools, has a long history of medical innovation. This week, we take a look at the characters who laid the foundation for these advancements – Resurrection Men. What founding father was a member of a secret grave robbing club? What were the steps to pulling off the perfect heist?
Episode 29: Wonder Woman's Real Life Origin Story (May 15, 2017)
May 15, 2017
Wonder Woman debuted in a December 1941 issue of All Star Comics, just as the attack on Pearl Harbor was drawing the US into World War II. In the comics, Wonder Woman’s origin story said that she was born to a race of Amazon women from Paradise Island, then disguised herself as the Boston career woman Diana Prince.
In real life, Wonder Woman was inspired by early feminist fights for suffrage and access to contraception, and she was the brainchild of one very unique family who called Cambridge home. Wonder Woman drew as much inspiration from pinup girls in Esquire Magazine as she did from the suffragists who chained themselves to the gates of Harvard Yard and the founders of Planned Parenthood. And she was directly inspired by the women in her creator’s life. Her trademark exclamation “Suffering Sappho,” was taken from one of these women, and her looks and bulletproof “bracelets of submission” were taken from the other.
Episode 28: The 1919 Boston Police Strike (May 8, 2017)
May 08, 2017
This week, we take an in depth look at the 1919 Boston Police Strike and ensuing riots. In the post-WW1 inflation of the summer of 1919, Boston police officers were earning wages set in 1857. Around the country, workers were striking, while the upper classes feared a Bolshevik-influenced revolution. When 72% of the police force walked off the job, lawlessness ruled in Boston for several days. Governor Calvin Coolidge sent in the state militia, and emerged a hero, paving his way to the White House.
Episode 27: Burned at the Stake (May 1, 2017)
May 01, 2017
Despite what a lot of people think, the victims of the Salem witch trials were hanged, not burned at the stake. However, in the history of Massachusetts, two women were executed by burning them at the stake, one in 1681 and another in 1755. If witchcraft was a crime against both the state and God, what crime could be worse in Puritan Boston?
A note about the content this week. We frankly describe acts of brutal violence, and we at times use the racial language of our 17th and 18th century sources. If you usually listen with children, you might want to listen to this episode alone first and decide if it’s appropriate for them.
Episode 26: Isaiah Thomas and the American Oracle of Liberty (Apr 23, 2017)
Apr 24, 2017
This week, we’re going to talk about Isaiah Thomas. Not the NBA star, but the colonial printer and founder of the Massachusetts Spy, whose office became known by the British as the Sedition Foundry. He snuck his presses out of Boston on the eve of war, helped Paul Revere spread the news of the British march, and shared first-hand accounts of the battles at Concord and Lexington. Later, he would spread his business empire across multiple states, and become a historian, founding the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Episode 25: The Court Martial of Paul Revere (Apr 16, 2017)
Apr 17, 2017
This week we celebrate Patriots’ Day, and the anniversary of Paul Revere’s famous ride. It’s easy to forget that Paul Revere’s story didn’t end on April 18, 1775. This week, we bring you a less glorious story about Paul Revere, one that’s not shrouded in myth. In 1779, Revere was among the leaders of a military expedition in Maine that ended with the greatest US Naval defeat prior to Pearl Harbor, and eventually led to his court martial on charges of cowardice and insubordination.
Well, listen children, and you shall hear, A different story of Paul Revere. In Maine, the troops fled before a British drive, Until hardly a man was left alive. They court martialed Paul in ‘82, I fear.
Episode 24: The Parkman Murder, Boston's Celebrity Trial of the (19th) Century (Apr 9, 2017)
Apr 10, 2017
In 1849, Boston was rocked by the crime of the (19th) century when Professor John Webster murdered Dr. George Parkman in his lab at Harvard Medical School. The world was riveted by the investigation and trial that ensued, while the Boston Brahmins were shaken to the core by the scandal in their ranks. The courtroom drama lived up to our modern-day CSI standards, offering one of the earliest uses of forensic evidence and a legal standard still in use today.
In March 1870, forty-two women marched into their polling place in Hyde Park and illegally cast ballots in the local election. They were led by local residents and radical activists Sarah and Angelina Grimké. The Grimké sisters were born into a slave owning family in South Carolina, but then spent their lives fighting for abolition, suffrage, and equal rights.
Episode 22: Brooke Barbier, author of Boston in the American Revolution (Mar 26, 2017)
Mar 26, 2017
This week’s episode features a conversation with Brooke Barbier, founder of Ye Olde Tavern Tours and author of the new book Boston in the American Revolution: A Town Versus an Empire. We talk about a forgotten Revolutionary War story, why the Revolutionary period isn’t as simple as good guys and bad guys, and which Founding Fathers we’d like to have a beer with.
Episode 21.1: The Tremont Street Subway Explosion (Mar 19, 2017)
Mar 20, 2017
On March 4, 1897, a giant explosion rocked the corner of Tremont Street and Boylston across from Boston Common. Ten people were killed, and dozens were injured. How did construction of America’s first subway lead to this disaster? And why was it so difficult for survivors to get compensation for their injuries?
Episode 20: John Hancock's Private Army (Mar 12, 2017)
Mar 12, 2017
When British General Thomas Gage arrived in Boston in 1774, he was met on Long Wharf by the patriot leader John Hancock at the head of an armed militia unit… But not for the reason you think.
Since 1772, Hancock had been the Captain of The Governor’s Independent Company of Cadets, an elite unit that provided ceremonial bodyguards to the Massachusetts governor. When Gage took over as military governor of the province, sparks flew. He summarily fired Hancock, and war broke out soon after.
They have been known through the centuries as the Governor’s Cadets, the Independent Company of Cadets, the Boston Independent Company, and the First Corps of Cadets, and they’ve served Massachusetts and the United States in domestic emergencies, and wars from the Revolution to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Episode 19: A Tale of Two Hermits (Mar 5, 2017)
Mar 06, 2017
This week’s episode examines two people who chose to live as hermits in and around Boston. When you think of a hermit, your mental image is probably a monk or an aging eccentric in a cabin in the woods somewhere. But our subjects this week sought out that kind of solitary existence among the hustle and bustle of the growing city of Boston in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. James Gately was known as the Hermit of Hyde Park, and Ann Winsor Sherwin was the Hermit of Boston Harbor.
Episode 18: Dr. Rebecca Crumpler's Trailblazing Career (Feb 26, 2017)
Feb 27, 2017
This week, we’re going to talk about a woman who studied medicine at a time when very few women could access higher education at all, and an African-American who became a physician at a time when half of this country believed that she could be owned by another American. Rebecca Davis Lee Crumpler would study in Boston and become America’s first black female doctor.
Episode 17: Vikings on the Charles River (minisode Feb 19, 2017)
Feb 19, 2017
Your hosts Nikki and Jake are away this week, but through the magic of podcasting, we’re still able to bring you this mini-sode. Since we’re exploring Iceland, land of the Vikings, it only makes sense to bring you the story of a 19th Century Boston millionaire who was convinced that Vikings had once settled along the Charles River.
Episode 16: Our Temple of Justice is a Slave Pen! (Feb 12, 2017)
Feb 12, 2017
This week, we’re going to wrap up our series on the Fugitive Slave Act, and the efforts of black and white abolitionists in Boston to resist what they saw as an unjust law. In last week’s show, we discussed how Lewis Hayden and the Vigilance Committee rescued the fugitive Shadrach Minkins from being returned to slavery. This week, we’re going to learn how that act of resistance led to a federal crackdown in Boston, look at two unsuccessful rescues that followed, and see how the unrest galvanized the apathetic population of Boston into a hotbed of radical abolitionism.
Episode 15: Resist! Shadrach Minkins and the Fugitive Slave Act (Feb 5, 2017)
Feb 06, 2017
With our new President doing his best to enforce unjust executive orders, we thought this would be a good moment to revisit an era in which Boston resisted an unjust law. After Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, abolitionists in Boston felt that the values of Southern slave power were being forced upon a free city.
In 1851, Shadrach Minkins was the first fugitive to be arrested in Boston, but before he could be returned to slavery, a multiracial mob stormed the courtroom and forcibly delivered him to the Underground Railroad.
Episode 14: Go in Peace, or Go in Pieces! (Jan 29, 2017)
Jan 30, 2017
Lewis Hayden was born into slavery in Kentucky. When he was ten years old, his owner traded him to a traveling salesman for a pair of horses. But Hayden and his family eventually escaped to freedom, and they settled in Boston.
Their Beacon Hill home was a refuge for enslaved people seeking freedom on the Underground Railroad, and he would go as far as threatening to blow the house up instead of cooperating with slave catchers, saying “Go in peace, or go in pieces!”
After Lewis Hayden’s death, his wife Harriet endowed a scholarship for African American students at Harvard Medical School, the only endowment contribution to a university made by a formerly enslaved person.
Episode 13: Katherine Nanny Naylor, Boston's Original Nasty Woman (Jan 22, 2017)
Jan 22, 2017
Boston in the 1600s was a theocracy, where the Puritan church ruled, and women were seen in many ways as the property of their husbands or fathers. Against that backdrop, a woman named Katherine Nanny Naylor stands out. She was able to win a divorce against her abusive and unfaithful husband, then spent the next 30 years as an entrepreneur. She provided herself and her family with a prosperous lifestyle, while living her life independently.
Episode 12: The Tragedy of Sacco and Vanzetti (Jan 15, 2017)
Jan 15, 2017
On August 22, 1927, Bartolomeo Sacco and Nicola Vanzetti were executed in the electric chair at Boston’s Charlestown State Prison. They were foreigners, accused of murder and ties to a shadowy terrorist group. Yet there were worldwide protests, and their funeral was one of the largest ever seen in Boston, with as many as 200,000 Bostonians in attendance. On the fiftieth anniversary of their deaths, Governor Dukakis officially cleared their names and declared a day of remembrance for them. How did these men go from hated foreign enemies to victims of a politicized justice system?
Episode 11: The Ursuline Convent Riots (Jan 8, 2017)
Jan 08, 2017
On a hot summer’s night in 1834, rumors swirled around a Catholic girls’ school in Charlestown. Catholicism was a frightening, unfamiliar religion, and Catholic immigrants were viewed with great suspicion. People said that the nuns were being held in slavery, or that Protestant children were being tortured and forcibly converted. A crowd gathered, and violence flared. When the sun rose the next morning, the Ursuline Convent lay in smoking ruins. Thirteen men were tried, but none served time. What deep seated biases led Yankee Boston down this dark road?
Episode 10: The Grisly Fairbanks Murder (Jan 1, 2017)
Jan 01, 2017
In August of 1801, a young man named Jason Fairbanks showed up on his sweetheart’s doorstep. He was covered in blood, and telling the story of a suicide pact gone wrong. This tale of a rich kid gone astray could be ripped from today’s tabloid headlines. Fairbanks and his presumed sweetheart Eliza Fales were the center of a sensational trial, a daring escape from jail, and a manhunt that stretched to the Canadian border. Does this story of star crossed lovers have a happy ending?
Episode 9: The Zoo Shipwreck (Dec 25, 2016)
Dec 25, 2016
There is a long history of shipwrecks in Boston Harbor. Many are terrifying, some are tragic. But one shipwreck is such an oddity that Boston hasn’t stopped talking about it for the past 75 years. When a freighter called The City of Salisbury steamed into Boston Harbor in 1938, it was loaded with exotic, tropical zoo animals. When it ran aground near Graves Light, you’ll never guess what happened next!
Episode 8: The Holiday Minisode (Dec 18, 2016)
Dec 19, 2016
Life got in the way this week, and we didn’t have a chance to prepare a full episode. We’re going to do a miniature episode (minisode!), on this week’s historical anniversaries, with a quick discussion of Christmas in Puritan Boston.
Episode 7: Jane Toppan, Nightmare Nurse (Dec 11, 2016)
Dec 11, 2016
In 1901, a woman named Jane Toppan was arrested on Cape Cod for murder. By the time she went on trial, she had confessed to killing 31 people in Boston, Cambridge, on the Cape, and around the region, and she’s suspected of killing 100 or more.
From a tragic childhood, she grew up to be a nurse. She tortured and murdered her patients in dark experiments, while being praised for her caring bedside manner. Before she was caught, she had graduated to killing entire families.
Episode 6: The First Boston Revolution (Dec 4, 2016)
Dec 04, 2016
Early one April morning, Boston rose up in revolt, overthrowing the widely hated royal governor. A provincial militia surrounded the city, while the Royal Navy backed British authorities. But this wasn’t Lexington or Concord. This was the 1689 revolt against Governor Edmund Andros, 86 years to the day before Paul Revere’s ride.
Episode 5: Secret Nazis on Boston Harbor (Nov 27, 2016)
Nov 27, 2016
At the end of World War II, the Allied powers raced across Germany, competing to capture technology related to Nazi super-weapons and the scientists who developed them. The US military operated a secret program that located high-value scientists, smuggling them into the US and falsifying their wartime records. For many of the scientists who went on to work on the Manhattan Project or the space race, their first stop in America was a secret base in Boston Harbor.
Episode 4: The Thanksgiving minisode (Nov 20, 2016)
Nov 20, 2016
Happy Thanksgiving everybody! This week, we’re doing a mini-sode (miniature episode, get it?) on this week’s historical anniversaries, with a quick discussion of Boston’s first Thanksgiving. Enjoy!
Episode 3: Slower than molasses (Nov 13, 2016)
Nov 13, 2016
When an industrial tank collapsed in Boston’s North End in 1919, a wave of molasses destroyed the surrounding neighborhood. 21 people were killed and at least 150 were injured, along with an untold number of horses. This tragedy is made all the worse by the fact that it was entirely preventable.
Episode 2: How Cotton Mather saved Boston (Nov 6, 2016)
Nov 06, 2016
When smallpox threatened Boston in 1721, Cotton Mather was a leading advocate of inoculation. How did this influential Puritan, best known for his role in the Salem witch trials, become an advocate for scientific medicine? Listen to this week’s episode to find out!
Episode 1: Remember remember the fifth of November (Oct 30, 2016)
Oct 30, 2016
How did early Boston “celebrate” on November 5th each year? By drinking, brawling, and burning effigies of the Pope, of course. Listen to this week’s episode to find out more!
Welcome to HUB History! We can't wait to share our favorite stories from Boston's long history. The first episode will air on October 30. In the meantime, visit http://HUBhistory.com/ to subscribe.
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himself as a “historian of race, politics, and the law in United States history.” Though he completed his PhD at the University of Michigan, he became interested in Boston’s complex history of race and politics while living here as an undergraduate. He joined us from Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, to discuss his book Race Over Party: Black Politics and Partisanship in Late Nineteenth-Century Boston.
We also wanted to establish the identity of the system and flag it in the streetscape. People had an affinity for the song “
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