When the US Army Invaded South Boston (episode 198)

In the 1940s, Boston was still an industrial city, and when the US entered World War II, that industrial might would be turned to wartime production. With industry comes labor disputes, and a new government agency was given extraordinary powers to resolve them. In other early cases, the National War Labor Board used its authority and the might of the military to break strikes by organized labor. However, in August 1942, they would step in to force an employer to honor their union contract, using the US Army to enforce workers’ rights. That employer was the SA Woods Machine Company of South Boston, and this Wednesday marks the anniversary of the military takeover of their plant, setting up an epic battle of wills between the SA Woods corporation and the US government, and between the company’s cantankerous president and the young major sent to take over his company.


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The Grand Derangement (episode 197)

One morning in August, redcoats fanned out across the province, taking entire families into custody, burning farms and crops, and killing livestock.  Falling in the middle of two centuries of intermittent warfare, this grand derangement, or great upheaval, didn’t take place in Boston or even in Massachusetts.  But Boston bore responsibility for the acts carried out in its name, and Boston would host the “French Neutrals,” the human byproducts of the purge that we remember as the expulsion of the Acadians who were confined in our city for nearly a decade.


Continue reading The Grand Derangement (episode 197)

The Gold Gilded Grasshopper (episode 196)

Faneuil Hall’s grasshopper weathervane is 4 feet long, weighs about 80 pounds, and is made out of copper that’s been covered with 23 carat gold. It’s found at the top of an 8 foot spire above Faneuil Hall’s cupola, which is in turn seven stories above ground level. So imagine the surprise that swept Boston on a January day in 1974 when people looked up and realized that the grasshopper was gone.  


Continue reading The Gold Gilded Grasshopper (episode 196)

Boston Goes to Bleeding Kansas (episode 195)

Bleeding Kansas was a deadly guerrilla war between so-called Border Ruffians from Missouri in support of slavery on one side, and earnest abolitionists from New England on the other.  The violence peaked on Kansas prairies in the decade before the US Civil War officially began, fought with guns, newspapers, artillery, and sometimes even broadswords.  A Boston-based company seeded those earnest abolitionists into that prairie and eventually looked the other way as they transformed themselves from farmers to vigilantes and soldiers.


Continue reading Boston Goes to Bleeding Kansas (episode 195)

The Prisoners of Peddocks Island (episode 194)

You may have heard stories about the Confederate prisoners who were held at Fort Warren on Georges Island during the civil war.  In this episode, we’ll explore a different island that housed prisoners during a different war.  Our story will start with the only soccer riot in recorded Boston history, which broke out at Carson Beach in South Boston on July 16, 1944.  It will end up with Italian war prisoners confined at Fort Andrews on Peddocks Island in Boston Harbor.  Along the way, we’ll meet bootleggers, artillerymen, Passamaquoddy seal hunters, opium fiends, and Portuguese-American fishermen.  We’ll also be taking a virtual visit to one of my personal favorite places in the Boston area, and one that is on the brink of being sold off to luxury hotel developers.


Continue reading The Prisoners of Peddocks Island (episode 194)

Prescott Townsend, From the First World War to the First Pride Parade, with Theo Linger (episode 193)

Prescott Townsend was one of the most interesting figures in Boston’s LGBTQ history.  He was the ultimate Boston Brahmin, coming of age at Harvard in the shadow of Teddy Roosevelt and enlisting in the Navy during World War I. He served time in prison after getting caught in a Beacon Hill tryst back when homosexuality was a crime in Boston, and spent decades as an activist, helping to found the gay liberation movement, and marched at the head of the nation’s first pride parade on the first anniversary of Stonewall.  We’re also going to meet a researcher who has uncovered new information about Prescott Townsend as part of an effort to improve how the National Park Service interprets the LGBTQ history of Boston.


Continue reading Prescott Townsend, From the First World War to the First Pride Parade, with Theo Linger (episode 193)

A People’s Guide to Greater Boston, with Joseph Nevins and Suren Moodliar (episode 192)

A People’s Guide to Greater Boston is a new kind of guidebook to Boston and surrounding towns.  Instead of giving an overview of the Freedom Trail and introducing readers to the hot restaurants and hotels of Boston, this guide uncovers the forgotten stories of radicals and activists hidden in every neighborhood and suburb.  It has sections covering Boston’s urban core, the neighborhoods, adjoining towns, and suburbs from Brockton to Haverhill.  In each section, the authors unearth a wide range of sites, and in some cases former sites, that are tied to Black, indigenous, labor, or other radical historic events and figures.  For listeners who complain that our normal episodes are too political, or our point of view is too liberal… well, sorry in advance.  This guide definitely doesn’t keep politics out of history, and its point of view is well to the left of our usual editorial voice.


Continue reading A People’s Guide to Greater Boston, with Joseph Nevins and Suren Moodliar (episode 192)

Pamphlets, Statues, and the Selling of Joseph (episode 191)

In June 1700, a brief pamphlet titled The Selling of Joseph was published in Boston.  It’s considered the first abolitionist tract to be published in what’s now the United States.  Authored by Salem witch trial judge Samuel Sewall, the three page pamphlet uses biblical references to argue that enslaving another person could never be considered moral.  Listen to find out what motivated Sewall to write the tract, how his peers in Boston reacted to it, and what its effect was on the wider world.  In light of recent events, we’ll also consider the current debate around statues and their removal.  


Continue reading Pamphlets, Statues, and the Selling of Joseph (episode 191)

Like a Trump of Coming Judgement (episode 190)

This week, we’re revisiting a classic episode about the radical Black abolitionist David Walker.  Walker was a transplant to Boston, moving here after possibly being involved in Denmark Vesey’s planned 1822 slave insurrection in South Carolina.  At a time when very few whites spoke of ending slavery, Frederick Douglass said Walker’s book An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World “startled the land like a trump of coming judgement.”  He demanded an immediate end to slavery, and he endorsed violence against white slave owners to bring about abolition.  After the book helped inspire Nat Turner’s 1830 uprising in Virginia, southern slave states banned his book and offered a reward for anyone who would kill or kidnap him.  With a price on his head, many people believed that David Walker’s mysterious death in a Beacon Hill doorway just a year after his landmark book was published was an assassination.  


Continue reading Like a Trump of Coming Judgement (episode 190)

The Gamblers’ Riot (episode 189)

For almost 400 years now, Boston has never needed much prompting to start a riot.  There have been anti-Catholic riots, anti-immigrant riots, anti-Catholic immigrant riots, anti-draft riots, pro-draft riots, anti-slavery riots, pro-slavery riots, bread riots, busing riots, and police riots. In the 20th century, sports began to be a driving factor behind riots in Boston. Long before Victoria Snelgrove was killed by a police pepperball after the 2004 World Series, before the fires and overturned cars after the 2001 Super Bowl, there was the Gamblers’ Riot. 103 years ago this week, gamblers at Fenway Park got mad at the umpires, at Babe Ruth, and at the Chicago White Sox and stormed the field. Listen now to learn what happened next!

Also… Hey, we won an award! Continue reading The Gamblers’ Riot (episode 189)