Avsnitt
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Isabella Stewart Gardner was a consummate collector, generous philanthropist, and rabid Red Sox fan. Today, she’s best known as the namesake of an art museum in Boston’s Fenway neighborhood (and if we’re being honest, the museum is probably best known for a famous 1990 heist). This week, Jake interviews author Emily Franklin, whose new novel The Lioness of Boston explores the person behind the Gardner fortune. They discuss the great romance, tragedy, and scandal of Isabella’s life, the different personas she tried on throughout different eras of her life, and her obsession with the idea of a legacy. Emily will tell us why Boston at first turned up its nose at wealthy young Isabella, but later came to embrace the flamboyant and eccentric Mrs Jack as one of our most colorful and generous characters. Emily will also describe what makes historical fiction different from biography, and the freedom and limitations that the genre brings.
Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/283/
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Enjoy two classic stories this week. First up is the story of the Cocoanut Grove fire. In November 1942, Boston was on a wartime footing, business was booming, and the streets were packed with soldiers and sailors on their way to fronts around the world. On the Saturday after Thanksgiving, a fire broke out at the popular Cocoanut Grove nightclub, and in the moments that followed, 492 people were killed, making it Boston’s most deadly disaster. After that, the podcast visits December 1917, when another world war raged in Europe. When confusing reports of a disaster to the north reached Boston, the city sprang into action, loading a special train with doctors, nurses, and medical supplies. After the most massive explosion before the advent of the atom bomb, Boston rushed relief to the town of Halifax. In return, they send us a Christmas tree each year.
Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/282/
Support us: http://patreon.com/HUBhistory/
Maui relief: https://www.mauinuistrong.info/support/ -
Saknas det avsnitt?
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80 years ago this month, on a tiny Pacific island, a legend was born. In the darkness before dawn on August 2, 1943, a Japanese destroyer rammed and sank a small, plywood boat commanded by a 26 year old Lieutenant Junior Grade named John Fitzgerald Kennedy. In the hours and days that followed, young Jack Kennedy would prove to be a true American hero, swimming mile after mile through shark and crocodile infested waters, while towing an injured crew member by a strap clenched in his teeth. In the ensuing decades, PT-109 has become one of the most famous small craft in US Navy history, largely due to Kennedy’s actions. However, it also became a craven political ploy, when JFK and his father Joseph Kennedy used the story of PT-109 to launch a political career that would carry Jack Kennedy to the Oval Office.
Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/281/
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This week, enjoy three classic stories about Bostonians and their adventures on the Pacific Ocean. First, we’ll hear about the voyages of the Columbia to the Pacific Northwest starting in 1787, then we’ll move on to the Congregational missionaries who descended on Hawaii in 1823, and finally, we’ll talk about the Boston whaler who brought the industrial revolution to Spanish California. While you’re listening to these three classic stories, see if you can figure out what I’m working on that would involve a Brookline native on a small boat in the Solomon Islands in August 1943!
Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/280/
Support us: http://patreon.com/HUBhistory/ -
This week's story ties one of modern Boston’s iconic Freedom Trail sites to the earliest days of English settlement in the Shawmut Peninsula. It’s a story that ties the first Puritan to die in Boston to the hated Royal governor Edmund Andros, and it ties some of the earliest non-English immigrants in Boston to Ben Franklin and Abigail Adams through the invention of two local industries. King’s Chapel is beloved in Boston today, but it was seen as an unwelcome invasion when it was first proposed in 1686. In this week’s show, we’ll look at how Boston found room for an unwanted church, how the church was reinvented three times, and how it launched local glassmaking and founded the granite industry in Quincy. We’ll also see where you can still find the last traces of the original, wooden King’s Chapel hiding inside the walls of a more modern church, but not here in Boston.
Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/279/
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Between the John Adams miniseries on HBO and the musical 1776, everyone knows that John Adams was one of the leading voices for independence in the Continental Congress. And along with negotiating the treaty of Paris and keeping the US out of the Quasi War, Adams always considered the Declaration one of his chief accomplishments. 50 years after Congress adopted it, John Adams remembered it on the morning of July 4, 1826, remarking “it is a great day. It is a good day.” That evening, he died, with many sources reporting that his last words were “Jefferson still lives.” He was wrong, though. Earlier that day, Jefferson had woken briefly, asked “is it the fourth” and then declined further medical treatment before slipping into a coma and himself dying. For someone who was so closely associated with America’s founding document, why did John Adams believe we should celebrate it on July 2nd? And how did his closest and most trusted advisor, his wife Abigail, urge him on toward independence in a letter that history remembers for other reasons? Let’s find out!
Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/278/
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Thomas Jefferson visited Boston in 1784, arriving in town on June 18th. That also happened to be the same day when Abigail Adams left her home in Quincy to start making her way to France to join John at his diplomatic posting, though her ship didn’t actually leave Boston until the next day. In this episode, we’ll explore how the friendship that was kindled during their single day together in Boston carried on through their shared months in France, their decades of correspondence, and even through the years when Jefferson and John Adams were feuding. We’ll also examine Thomas Jefferson as an early New England tourist, who explored not only Boston, but also New Haven, Portsmouth, and other key regional population centers, as well as taking a fun look at his epic Boston shopping spree just days before he too boarded a boat to Europe.
Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/277/
Support us: http://patreon.com/HUBhistory/ -
The new play “Revolution’s Edge” will debut at Old North Church in June 2023. It tells the story of three Bostonians and their families on the eve of the Revolution. Mather Byles is the Loyalist rector of Old North Church, Cato is an African American man who’s enslaved by Byles, and John Pulling is a whiggish ship’s captain and member of the Old North vestry. The three men have very different stations in life, but they all have young families with intertwined lives, and on April 18, 1775, they all had very different decisions to make about those lives. My guests this week are Patrick Gabridge, producing artistic director of the Plays in Place theater company, and Nikki Stewart, executive director of Old North Illuminated. Together, they’ll tell us how this, um, revolutionary new drama came to be.
Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/276/
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If you walk down Mount Auburn Street in Cambridge, you might notice a small stone marker that states, “on this spot in the year 1000, Leif Erikson built his house in Vineland.” You might be surprised to learn that Leif Erikson had a house in Cambridge, and if so, you’ll be even more surprised to learn that the lower Charles River was the seat of a thriving Norse city around the turn of the first millennium. Learn about Harvard professor Eben Norton Horsford’s theory that the legendary Viking city of Norumbega was situated along the Charles River in this week’s podcast!
Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/275/
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Thanks to the Hamilton musical, it’s almost impossible to hear the names Angelica, Eliza, and Peggy without bursting into song. The play made the three eldest daughters of Philip Schuyler famous, and in this episode we’re talking about the first two sisters, but mostly just Angelica. Fans know that there was a flirtation between Angelica and Hamilton, but that relationship was exaggerated for the show. Angelica’s actual romance and marriage were downplayed for the show, but it was this union that brought Angelica Schuyler Church to Boston, where she lived for over two years under an assumed name. What was she doing here, and who was the mysterious John Carter who escorted her here?
Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/274/
Support us: http://patreon.com/HUBhistory/ -
Spring in Boston means baseball, and this week we're talking about the time in 1874 when the Boston Red Stockings tried to bring America’s national pastime to Britain. 120 years before the World Baseball Classic, Boston’s biggest baseball promoter did his level best to get the cricket fans in “jolly old” hooked on his game… and the fact that he could sell them all the mitts, bats, and gloves they would need was just a happy accident, I’m sure. Red Stockings pitcher and future sporting goods magnate Al Spalding led the team on the World Baseball Tour, but would they be able to convert English strikers to batters and bowlers to pitchers? And for the team, would their nearly two month long diversion mean the end of their pennant race for 1874?
Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/273/
Support us: http://patreon.com/HUBhistory/ -
John Adams later described the prosecution of William Corbet as a case “of an extraordinary Character, in which I was engaged and which cost me no small Portion of Anxiety.” In 1769, four common sailors were brought into Boston to stand trial for murder. The victim was an officer in the royal navy, and the crime had taken place just off Cape Ann, almost within sight of home. As Boston suffered under military occupation, could a military victim receive justice in a radicalized Boston? And what really happened on that ship near Marblehead? Had the dead officer really just been searching for cargo that the captain hadn’t declared and paid customs on? Or were they up to something darker, like illegally kidnapping Massachusetts sailors and forcing them to serve in the Royal Navy?
Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/272/
Support us: http://patreon.com/HUBhistory -
On April 9, 1863, a shooting was carried out in a basement just off of Court Street, behind Boston’s Old City Hall. The gunman was a Union cavalry officer, who belonged to one of Brahmin Boston’s most wealthy families. The victim was a new Irish American recruit in his brigade. The shooting would result in accusations of cowardice and an execution, but was either justified?
Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/271
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Just a quick bonus episode, so I can tell you about a change to my personal life and what it means for the show.
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Starting in 1884, audiences of veterans, schoolchildren, and everyday Bostonians streamed into a cavernous, castle-like building on Tremont Street in the South End to witness the closest thing to virtual reality that existed at the time. The building still exists, though a series of renovations have rendered it much more ordinary and less palatial than it was back then. The painting still exists too, and it still offers an immersive experience for visitors that blends reality and art, but not in Boston anymore. The building was known as the Cyclorama, and it was purpose built to hold the painting, which was also known as the cyclorama, one of the most audacious artistic endeavors of the 19th century. Together, they commemorated the turning point of the bloody Civil War that had ended two decades earlier.
Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/270/
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Annie L. Burton was an entrepreneur and restaurateur, who moved to Boston as a young woman after spending her childhood enslaved on an Alabama plantation. Annie spent decades as a domestic servant, first in the south, and then in the north, in Newton, the South End, Wellesley, Jamaica Plain, and other neighborhoods in and around Boston. For most Black women in the years and decades after emancipation, cooking, cleaning, raising children, and washing and ironing for white families were among the only opportunities available for paid work, making Annie’s experience utterly typical. Two things make her life unique: her decision to bet on herself and open a series of restaurants, first in Florida, then in Park Square in Boston, and then in a number of New England resort towns; and her decision, just after the turn of the 20th century, to put pen to page and write her story down and publish it, preserving the details of her life in a way that wasn’t available to most of her peers.
Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/269/
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Joseph Lee was a hotelier, caterer, and one of the richest men in his adopted hometown of Newton. By the time of his death in 1908, Lee had worked as a servant, a baker, and for the National Coast Survey; he had worked on ships, in hotels, and at amusement parks. He had earned a vast fortune in hotels, lost most of it, and earned another one through his patented inventions that helped change the way Americans eat. He had entertained English nobles and American presidents. And he had raised three daughters and one son, who was a star Ivy League tackle before graduating from Harvard. If you make bread at home, or meatballs, or fried chicken, or casserole, you are the beneficiary of the technology Joseph Lee developed. That would be a remarkable life for anyone, but Joseph Lee was enslaved in South Carolina until he was about 15 years old, making his accomplishments even more remarkable.
Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/268/
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In the 1760s, the town gaol (jail) where prisoners were held while awaiting trial was a cold, dark, and truly terrifying edifice on Queen Street, just up the hill from the Old State House. When a fire was discovered in the jailhouse just after 10pm on January 30, 1769, it briefly became the focal point of the long-simmering tensions between the town and the occupying British soldiers that would eventually culminate in the Boston Massacre. Who deliberately set the fire in the jail, and why were some of the prisoners grievously injured before they could be rescued? Who was responsible for patrolling the streets of a city under military occupation? What was the legal role of the occupiers during a fire emergency, and how did the fire at the old Boston jail become a surprising story of cooperation between the rival factions in Boston? Listen now for all those answers and more!
Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/267/
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How can something as simple as streetlights transform a city? What can the Boston Massacre teach us about how dark the streets and alleyways of Boston were in the years before streetlights? How did the town decide to buy English oil lamps for the streets but fuel them with American whale oil? How did Boston’s very first street lamps survive a shipwreck and the Boston Tea Party, and who decided where they would be installed and how they would be maintained? In the era of climate change, what does the future hold for Boston’s quaint remaining gas street lamps? Let’s find out!
Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/266/
Support us: http://patreon.com/HUBhistory/ -
Frank Hart was a transplant to Boston who became a famous star in a sport that no longer really exists. Hart was a pedestrian, competing in grueling six-day races where the winner was the person who could run, walk, or even crawl the most miles by the time the clock ran out. He made his debut in the Bean Pot Tramp here in Boston, but he followed the money to races in New York, London, San Francisco, and beyond, becoming one of America’s first famous Black athletes. However, Frank Hart’s career declined along with the popularity of pedestrianism, while the rise of Jim Crow raised new hurdles for a Black competitor. Joining us this week to discuss the rise and fall of Frank Hart is Davy Crockett, the host of the Ultrarunning History podcast and author of the new biography Frank Hart: The First Black Ultrarunning Star.
Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/265/
Support us: http://patreon.com/HUBhistory/ - Visa fler
