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.
When Darkness Veiled the Sky
- A 1912 Forest Service report explaining what causes Boston’s dark days.
- Professor Samuel Williams’ contemporaneous scientific account of the 1780 dark day.
- Abigail Adams describes the 1780 dark day.
- Cotton Tufts describes the 1780 dark day.
- George Washington’s account of the 1780 dark day in faraway New Jersey.
- Abraham Davenport prefers to be found at his desk if the 1780 dark day is actually the end of the world.
- Modern analysis reveals the source of the smoke in 1780.
- Sidney Perley’s history of storms and weather in New England, including descriptions of dark days.
- A letter from Emily Dickinson on the 1881 yellow day.
- Ryan W Owen’s article about Boston’s yellow day.
- The first photograph of a comet, made in 1881 just weeks before the yellow day.
- An artist’s rendering of comet C/1888 K1.
- Wild conspiracy theories about a dark day in 1950.
Total Eclipse
- Viewing details for the 2017 eclipse in Boston
- In an article on Quaker martyr Mary Dyer, Christy K Robertson tipped me off to the 1659 eclipse.
- Thomas Jefferson misses the 1778 Eclipse.
- More on the 1779 Massachusetts expedition against the British on Penobscot Bay in Episode 25.
- The 1780 expedition to view an eclipse at Penobscot Bay.
- Putting that expedition in the context of the Revolution.
- A letter ordering the state to outfit a ship for the 1760 expedition.
- The New York Times reports on why the 1806 eclipse was particularly good for viewers in Boston.
- Cows on Boston Common were disturbed by the 1806 total eclipse.
- The path of the 1806 eclipse.
Boston Book Club
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.