Category: Episodes

Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter, with Kerri Greenidge (episode183)

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.   


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Unequal Justice in Boston (episode 182)

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.


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The Bloody Flux of 1775, with Judy Cataldo (episode 181)

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.


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Ghosts and Shadows of Automobile Row, with Ken Liss (episode 180)

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. 


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Dr. Thomas Young, the Forgotten Revolutionary, with Scott Nadler (episode 179)

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.


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Puritan Countermagic Revisited (episode 178)

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.  


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The Deleterious Effects of Marsh Miasmata (episode 177)

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, frightening, and funny 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.


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Epidemics and Public Health in Boston (episode 176)

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.


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The Missing Passengers of Flight 30 (episode 175)

World Airways flight 30 landed at Logan Airport on January 23, 1982, in the middle of an ice storm. The plane touched down late on a slippery runway, sliding into Boston Harbor and breaking in half.  The passengers and flight attendants pulled off an impressive self rescue, and fewer than 40 of the 198 passengers and 12 crew were hospitalized. While the FAA, Massport, and World Airways all argued publicly about who was to blame for the accident, they all agreed that it was a miracle that nobody had been killed in the crash…  Or had they?


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Remembering the Boston Massacre, with Nat Sheidley (episode 174)

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.


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