Martin Luther King’s Boston, with Dr. Imari Paris Jeffries (episode 320)

This week, Dr. Imari Paris Jeffries joins us to talk about the years when Martin Luther King, Jr lived in Boston.  As you’ll hear him say in just a few minutes, Dr. King is a figure that most of us only imagine as a grainy newsreel image or a voice crackling on an old recording, so it can be hard to imagine Dr. King as flesh and blood.  With Dr. Paris Jeffries’ help, we’re going to imagine the Boston that Reverend King experienced: where he studied, where he fell in love with Coretta Scott, and where he would return over a decade later, when he had already become a legend in his own time.


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The Silenced Muse: Emily Hale, T.S. Eliot, and the Role of a Lifetime, with Sara Fitzgerald (episode 319)

In this episode, Sara Fitzgerald joins us to discuss her new book The Silenced Muse: Emily Hale, T.S. Eliot, and the Role of a Lifetime.  It is the first book-length biography of Emily Hale, the longtime love and secret creative muse of poet T.S. Eliot, who wrote Emily Hale over 1100 letters over the decades of their complicated relationship.  However, their relationship was mostly forgotten by history after their letters were locked away for 50 years after their deaths, to protect the innocent.  By the time the archive was opened in January 2020, few scholars understood the depth of their relationship.  This book reestablishes Hale, not only as a major influence on T.S. Eliot’s body of work, but also as her own woman.  From Hale’s upbringing in Chestnut Hill to their first flirtation in a Harvard Square parlor, Fitzgerald traces the intertwining lives of Hale and Eliot over a half a century that revolves around the intellectual center of gravity that is Boston.


Continue reading The Silenced Muse: Emily Hale, T.S. Eliot, and the Role of a Lifetime, with Sara Fitzgerald (episode 319)

Beastly Boston (episode 318)

Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!  This week, we’re talking about Boston’s first encounters with exotic animals.  I will be talking about the very first lion to make an appearance in Boston, but instead of tigers and bears, we’ll take a look at Boston’s experiences with elephants and alligators.  Our story will span almost 200 years, with the first lion being imported in the early 1700s, the first elephant in the late 1700s, and the first alligators that most Bostonians got acquainted with were installed in the Public Garden in 1901.  Can you imagine proper late-Victorian Bostonians crowding around a pool of alligators to watch them tear live animals limb from limb?  I couldn’t either before digging into this week’s episode.


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Boston Pre- and Post-Roe (episode 317)

Thirty years ago this week, Brookline became the site of the most deadly anti-abortion violence in American history, at least up to that point.  Sadly, right wing extremists and religious terrorists have since eclipsed the bloodshed on Beacon Street on December 30, 1994.  On that day, two women’s health clinics were targeted by a radical with a gun because, along with pap smears, birth control, and STD screenings, they provided abortion care.  His shooting spree left two people dead, five wounded, and fit into a national pattern of violence against abortion providers.  This week, we’ll review that heartbreaking case, then we’ll revisit a classic episode that warns us what could happen to pregnant women in Boston before Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in America through the tragic example of Jennie Clarke.


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America’s First Christmas Cards (episode 316)

Have you ever wondered where the tradition of sending Christmas cards every year came from?  While the first Christmas cards appeared in Britain back in the 1840s, it was a German immigrant named Louis Prang who made them popular in the United States and around the world.  Using a revolutionary new color printing technique that he called chromolithography, Prang’s Roxbury factory made the most popular greeting cards in the country from the 1870s until the turn of the century. 


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Boston Airs America’s First Television Commercial (episode 315)

94 years ago this week, Boston’s second television station aired the first commercial in American history, and they did it almost two decades before Boston’s first television station went on the air. In this episode, we use this blunder and a confusing technological landscape to examine Boston’s pivotal role in the early development of American television. This will be a story of innovation, some of the earliest experimental television broadcasters in the country, and the parallel development of mechanical and electronic television technologies.


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Remembering Rita (episode 314)

The annual Transgender Day of Remembrance calls attention to an epidemic of violence against trans people, and Black trans women in particular, but did you know that this solemn event was inspired by a brutal 1998 Allston murder? In this episode, we hear from the friends of Rita Hester about a vibrant life that was inspired by music and cut short by violence. We’ll see how her murder fit a pattern of crimes in the Boston area in the late 90s and how Rita’s family and friends channeled their grief into activism. You’ll also have to suffer through some meandering personal anecdotes, because this is one of the only episodes of the show to recount an event in Boston history that took place since I lived here.


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The Boston Cowboy Strike (episode 313)

In this episode, we explore the 1936 Boston cowboy strike, a one-day wildcat strike that became the founding moment for a labor union that still exists today. Staged by an organization that became known as the Cowboy Turtle Association at the old Boston Garden, this was the first rodeo strike in the world. While I call it a cowboy strike, cowgirls were an important feature of this particular rodeo, and the union’s longterm success is due in no small part to the wife of a champion cowboy. Why was a cowboy union formed in Boston, of all places? And how did it get the name Cowboy Turtle Association? Listen now!

Hat tip to listener Sam S for suggesting this week’s topic!

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Boston’s Spooky Sea Serpent (episode 312)

In this episode, we dive into the lasting folklore of Boston’s sea serpent, a supposedly true tale rooted in the early colonial history of New England. The story begins with a dubious 1639 account, continues through repeated sightings in the early 1800s, and extends into the 20th century. From the beginning, skeptics poked holes in accounts of the serpent, even when the scientific Linnaean Society fell for the story hook, line, and sinker. However, the idea of a sea monster on Massachusetts shores helped transform Nahant into a summer tourist destination, drawing curious visitors eager to spot the serpent and keeping the legend alive for a century.


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Damming the Charles River (episode 311)

The construction of Boston’s Charles River Dam was a monumental project that transformed the tidal estuary of the Back Bay into a fresh-water basin, providing a 20th century solution to problems that the city inherited from the 19th, including issues with industrial waste, sanitation, and general public distaste for the acres of mudflats that were exposed at low tide. Temporary floodgates closed on October 20, 1908, which marked the first separation of the waters of Boston Harbor from the Back Bay’s brackish salt marsh. In the lead-up to this moment, earthen dams were constructed on both sides of the river, with a lock allowing boats to pass through the dam on the Boston side and a sluiceway to regulate water levels in the upstream basin on the Cambridge side. A temporary wooden dam was built to close the center of the river, allowing for the construction of a permanent dam made of dirt and rock.  Despite facing opposition and challenges, the dam was successfully completed in 1910, resulting in the creation of the Charles River Basin, the Esplanade, and some of Boston’s most iconic sites for outdoor recreation.


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