Women’s Groups Remaking Boston (episode 150)

This week’s show dusts off two classic stories about times in Boston history when women’s volunteer organizations had a big impact on Boston.  First, we’ll talk about the Massachusetts Emergency and Hygiene Association, whose members introduced the concept of a playground to the American public in late 19th century Boston.  Then, we’ll fast forward a few decades to the 19 – teens, when the Women’ Municipal League sponsored Boston’s first (and so far only ) Rat Day. Both of these projects made valuable contributions to Boston’s quality of life, and they happened at a time when society didn’t generally approve of women’s work outside the home.


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Boston’s Rock n Roll Riots (episode 149)

Boston has never needed much of an excuse to riot.  Over almost four centuries, we’ve had political riots, racist and xenophobic riots, and plenty riots that seem to be about nothing at all.  Of all the things Bostonians could choose to riot over, a rock and roll show might just be the most frivolous of all.  And yet Boston, like many other cities, has a rich history of riots and near-riots at rock concerts.  If you take enough excited young people and pack them into a tight enough space, with with enough hormones (and quite possibly booze or drugs) coursing through their veins, it doesn’t take much of a spark to set off the powderkeg.  From Chuck Berry to Led Zeppelin, and from the Rolling Stones to Green Day, we’re looking into the causes and consequences of some of the most iconic melees in Boston’s rock and roll history.


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Mayor Curley’s Plan to Ban the Klan (episode 148)

In the early 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan expanded into New England and tried to make Boston a capital of their invisible empire.  However, their deep hatred for Catholics and Jews, as well as their promotion of “100% Americanism,” made the KKK a hard sell in an area where the population was growing rapidly, with a constant stream of Jewish and Catholic immigrants.  After staying on the sidelines at first, Boston’s colorful mayor James Michael Curley made it his mission to drive the KKK out of Boston. After a few highly publicized Klan rallies in and around Boston, Curley began to fight them with rhetoric and questionably legal manipulation of the city permitting process.


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The Dread Pirate Rachel (episode 147)

History records that Rachel Wall was the last woman to be hanged in Massachusetts, and legend remembers her as the only woman pirate from Boston.  Her highly publicized trial took place as America implemented its new constitutional government. The state attorney general who prosecuted her had been a signer of the Declaration of Independence.  A few weeks after the trial, the presiding judge became one of the first US Supreme Court justices, and her defense attorney, who had helped ratify the constitution, soon became the first US Attorney for Massachusetts under the constitution.  Not only that, but her death warrant carried perhaps the most famous signature in US history, that of governor John Hancock. On this week’s episode, we uncover the fascinating true story of Rachel Wall’s life, trial, and death that’s hiding within the legend.  


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No other answer but from the mouth of his cannon (episode 146)

Boston and Quebec City share a deeply intertwined history that goes back to the earliest days of English settlement in North America.  Puritan Boston could hardly stand the idea that their closest European neighbor was a Catholic colony, and they made many attempts to drive the hated French from the continent.  To defeat the French, the New Englanders would have to take fortresses at Louisbourg, Quebec, and Montreal. We recently talked about the 1745 siege of Louisbourg, but this week we’re going even further back in time.  In 1690, Sir William Phips, the frontier shepherd who found a sunken treasure and became a knight, led a large fleet of ships and over 2000 soldiers out of Boston. Their goal was to reduce the defenses of Quebec and force the French colonists to submit to the British crown, but the result was a total disaster.


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Boston’s Dark Days and Eclipses (episode 145)

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. 


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Aeroplane Fever (episode 144)

Sky Jockeys, Knights of the Air, and Man-Birds were just a few of the terms that newspapers around the country used to describe the early aviators who converged on Boston in September 1910.  The first Harvard-Boston Aero Meet was the largest and most exciting air show that the world had ever seen, and it left Boston gripped by a bad case of aeroplane fever.  Famous pilots from the US and around the world, including even Wilbur Wright, would compete for cash prizes in a number of categories, including a high-stakes race to Boston Light in the outer harbor.  Tens of thousands of spectators gawked at the spectacle, reporters provided breathless coverage, and the military watched carefully to see if these newfangled flying machines could ever be useful in warfare.  The event was so successful that the organizers extended it by three days beyond what was originally scheduled, then followup meets were scheduled for the next two years.


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The Secret Tunnels of Boston’s North End (episode 143)

If you’ve ever taken a walking tour of Boston’s North End, or if you’ve talked to the old timers in the neighborhood, you’ve probably heard stories about the network of so-called secret pirate tunnels or smugglers’ tunnels that connects the wharves to the basements of houses, Old North Church, and even crypts in Copp’s Hill burying ground.  Sometimes the tunnels are attributed to a Captain Gruchy, who’s often called a pirate or a smuggler, and who is portrayed as a shadowy figure. It doesn’t take much research to debunk this version of the story, and yet there is historical evidence for tunnels under the streets of the North End. This week, we’ll take a look at that evidence and try to separate fact from fiction.


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The Cessna Strafer (episode 142)

This week, our show brings you  the story of what might be the only example of someone “going postal” in the air.  We’re discussing a bizarre 1989 incident involving a North Shore man, a veteran and postal worker.  Alfred J Hunter III had always wanted to be a pilot, and thirty years ago this summer, he got the chance.  He murdered his ex-wife, stole a plane at gunpoint, and then flew around shooting up the city of Boston with an assault rifle.  


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Annexation and Perambulation (episode 141)

This week’s show revisits two classic HUB History episodes that are all about the boundaries of the city of Boston.  First, we’ll go back to a show that originally aired last January to learn why independent towns like Roxbury, Dorchester, and Charlestown were eager to be annexed into the city of Boston in the mid- to late-19th century, and we’ll examine why Boston hasn’t annexed any other municipalities since Hyde Park in 1912.  Of course, once you make the boundaries of the city bigger by annexing your neighbors, you have to keep track of those new boundaries. So our second clip will be from a show that aired way back in September of 2017, about the ancient practice of perambulating the bounds. Since the 1650s, Massachusetts law has required towns to clearly mark their boundaries with other towns, and to send somebody out to walk the line and examine the markers every five years.


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