“The Birth of a Nation” in Boston (episode 121)

“The Birth of a Nation” was one of the most controversial movies ever made, and when it premiered on February 8, 1915 it almost instantly became the greatest blockbuster of the silent movie era.  It featured innovative new filmmaking techniques, a revolutionary score, and it was anchored by thrilling action scenes shot on a never-before-seen scale, with thousands of actors and extras, hundreds of horses, and battlefield effects like real cannons.

“Birth of a Nation” was unapologetically racist, promoting white supremacy and glorifying the Ku Klux Klan as the noble, heroic saviors of white America from the villainous clutches of evil black men bent on rape and destruction.  Upon the film’s 50th anniversary in 1965, NAACP president Roy Wilkins proclaimed that all the progress that African Americans had made over the past half century couldn’t outweigh the damage done by “Birth of a Nation.”

When the film debuted in Boston in April of 1915, audience reaction was split along racial lines, with white Bostonians flocking to see the movie in record numbers, while black Bostonians organized protests and boycotts, with leaders like William Monroe Trotter attempting to have it banned in Boston.


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Lewis Latimer, Master Inventor (episode 120)

African American inventor and draftsman Lewis Latimer’s parents self-emancipated to give their children the opportunities afforded to those born into freedom. A Chelsea native, Latimer’s career took him from the Navy, to a patent law firm, to the prestigious circle of Thomas Edison’s pioneers.


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Apocalypse on Boston Bay (episode 119)

In the years immediately before English Puritans settled on the Shawmut Peninsula, a series of epidemics nearly wiped out the indigenous population of New England.  The worst of these plagues was centered on Boston Harbor, and swept from Narragansett Bay in the south to the Penobscot River in the North. It was the greatest tragedy to befall Native peoples of the region, who sometimes referred to it as “the Great Dying,” while English settlers called it a “wonderful plague” or a “prodigious pestilence.”  They believed the disease had been sent by God to purge the native inhabitants of the continent and make way for his chosen people.


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Worst Case Scenarios (episode 118)

This week’s show revisits three classic episodes about disasters in Boston history. We’ll start with episode 21, which spotlighted the 1897 subway explosion on Tremont Street. Episode 39 discusses the tragedy at the Cocoanut Grove, followed by episode 91 on the collapse of the Pickwick nightclub. They key takeaway this week?  We should all be thankful for modern building codes, safety measures, and government oversight.


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David Walker’s Radical Appeal (episode 117)

David Walker was one of America’s first radical abolitionists, a free African American man who moved to Boston in 1824 to escape the danger and humiliations of life in the slave states. He became a prominent member of Black society in Boston before writing and distributing An Appeal to the Colored People of the World. This radical work called for the immediate abolition of slavery, and even advocated violence against whites to bring about emancipation. At the time, few white leaders were talking openly about ending slavery, and those who were favored gradual emancipation. Frederick Douglass would later say that the book “startled the land like a trump of coming judgement,” and it shook the slaveowning society of the white South to the core.


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Horace Mann, Education Innovator (episode 116)

Boston has always been a city that valued education, and few people did as much to improve our educational system as Horace Mann.  He started from modest means, living out the one-liner in Good Will Hunting about getting a $150,000 education for $1.50 in late fees at the library.  Mann served as a tutor and a librarian before being elected to the Massachusetts legislature.  It was, however, as the Commonwealth’s first Secretary of Education that Horace Mann transformed education in Massachusetts by fundamentally reforming how our teachers are trained.  His method would eventually be adopted by much of the country.  You’re welcome!


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Crossing the River Charles (episode 115)

What do you know about the earliest crossings over the Charles River in Boston?  When it was founded, the town of Boston occupied the tip of the narrow Shawmut Peninsula, with the harbor on one side and the Charles RIver on the other.  Residents relied first on ferries, and later on a series of bridges to connect them with the surrounding towns and countryside. The progression of bridge construction illustrates not only the state of construction technology, but also the birth of corporations in America and a landmark Supreme Court case defining the limits of private property rights.


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New Year, New… Twitter Archive?

If you follow us on Twitter, you know that we share daily historical trivia about what happened on that day in Boston history through the years.  What’s that?  You don’t follow @HUBhistory on Twitter?  You should start.)  I have a real job, so I can’t troll through the historical sources every day to find these tidbits.  Instead, I let my Twitter archive do the work for me, building a giant chronological spreadsheet of Boston trivia that I can quickly check each day.  As I find and tweet new resources, the spreadsheet grows each year.

Around the first week of January each year, I download my archive and convert it into a spreadsheet so I have an updated list.  If you have chronological content in Twitter, you might find this process useful, too.  (And even if you don’t, it can’t hurt to have a backup of your tweets that’s easy to use.) Continue reading New Year, New… Twitter Archive?

Smallpox Remastered (episode 114)

Although Cotton Mather is best known for his role in the Salem Witch Trials, he also pioneered smallpox inoculation in North America, using a traditional African method he learned from a man named Onesimus who Mather enslaved.  This week, you’ll hear about Boston’s history with smallpox, including multiple epidemics, the controversy surrounding Mather’s inoculation movement, and the final outbreak in the 20th century.  We first covered this topic way back in Episode 2, but these days we’re better at researching, writing, and recording, so this episode should be a step up.


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