The Secret Tunnels of Boston’s North End (episode 143)
Jul 28, 2019
Show notes
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.
The Cessna Strafer (episode 142)
Jul 21, 2019
Show notes
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
Show notes
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
Show notes
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
Show notes
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
Show notes
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
Show notes
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
Show notes
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
Show notes
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
Show notes
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.
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