For many people, summertime in Boston means canoeing, kayaking, paddle boarding, fishing, and even swimming in the rivers that run through and around our city. To celebrate the season this week we’re coming three classic episodes about industry, adventure, and romance on the water. We’ll hear about the nearly 400 year history of corn, cotton, and condos on the Mother Brook; some late-nineteenth century fake news about Vikings on the Charles; and the early 20th century canoe craze that drove the state police to ban kissing in canoes on the Charles River. Listen now!
Tag: 17th Century
Pirate Classics (episode 80)
Arrrr, matey! Nikki and I are running a pirate themed relay race on Cape Cod this weekend instead of recording a new episode, so of course we’re going to play three classic pirate stories this week. The first two clips will highlight the role Boston played in the golden age of piracy, while the third discusses Puritan minister Cotton Mather’s complicated relationship with the pirates whose execution he oversaw. Listen now!
Pope’s Night, Remastered (Ep75)
This week, we’re revisiting the bizarre holiday known as Pope’s Night that was celebrated in early Boston. Having evolved out of the British observation of Guy Fawkes Day, Boston took the event to extremes. The virulently anti-Catholic colonists in our town held festive bonfires, parades, and plenty of drinking. Almost every year, the celebration would lead to massive street fights and riots that sometimes turned deadly, all to commemorate a thwarted plot against the British Parliament. Pope’s Night was the subject of our very first podcast, and we’re happy to revisit it here with better research, more practiced storytelling, and hopefully better audio quality.
Original Sin: The Roots of Slavery in Boston (Ep74)
The Boston slave trade began when a ship arrived in the harbor in the summer of 1638 carrying a cargo of enslaved Africans, but there was already a history of slave ownership in the new colony. After this early experience, Massachusetts would continue to be a slave owning colony for almost 150 years. In this week’s episode, we discuss the origins of African slavery in Massachusetts and compare the experience of enslaved Africans to other forms of unfree labor in Boston, such as enslaved Native Americans, Scottish prisoners of war, and indentured servants.
Warning: This week’s episode uses some of the racialized language of our 17th and 18th century sources, and it describes an act of sexual violence.
Continue reading Original Sin: The Roots of Slavery in Boston (Ep74)
Episode 66: Cotton Mather REALLY Hated Pirates
This week, we’re talking about the conflict between Puritans and pirates in the late 1600s and early 1700s. Cotton Mather is remembered for his role in the Salem Witch Trials, but he was the childhood minister to Ben Franklin, ultimate symbol of the American Enlightenment, and he died less than fifty years before our Declaration of Independence was signed. In a way, Mather was one of the last Puritans, and some of his most famous sermons are the ones he wrote for mass executions of pirates. Times were changing, setting up a conflict between rigidly hierarchical Puritan societies and fledgling democracies that could be found on board pirate ships.
Continue reading Episode 66: Cotton Mather REALLY Hated Pirates
Episode 64: Harvard Indian College, Promises Broken… and Kept
There’s an oft forgotten clause written into Harvard’s 1650 charter promising to educate the Native American youth of Massachusetts. This week’s episode looks at the early, mostly unsuccessful efforts to create an Indian College on the Harvard campus, the abandonment of that plan after King Philip’s War soured the English settlers on their earlier plans for Christianizing local Native American tribes, and how modern scholarship is helping to rediscover this legacy and rededicate Harvard to embracing Native Americans.
Continue reading Episode 64: Harvard Indian College, Promises Broken… and Kept
Episode 63: Puritan UFOs
What did TV character Fox Mulder have in common with John Winthrop, the Puritan founder of Boston? They both recorded strange lights in the sky and other unexplained phenomena in extensive detail. This week, we’re going to explore the close encounters Winthrop described in 1639 and 1644. There were unexplained lights darting around the sky in formation at impossible speeds, ghostly sounds, and witnesses who claimed to have lost time. It’s a scene straight out of the X-Files, except these are considered the first recorded UFO sightings in North America.
Episode 59: Corn, Cotton, and Condos; 378 Years on the Mother Brook
Everyone knows the Charles River and the Neponset River, but have you ever heard of the Mother Brook? It is America’s first industrial canal, built by Puritan settlers in the earliest days of Massachusetts Bay Colony, and vital to the development of Dorchester, Hyde Park, and Dedham. Plus, by connecting the rivers on either side, it turns the landmass occupied by Newton, Brookline, and most of Boston into an island!
Continue reading Episode 59: Corn, Cotton, and Condos; 378 Years on the Mother Brook
Episode 44: Perambulating the Bounds
Since 1651, Boston has had a legal responsibility to mark and measure its boundaries every few years. Despite advances in technology, the practice of “perambulating the bounds” means that someone has to go out and walk the town lines. This law is one of the oldest still on the books, but when was the last time Boston perambulated its bounds? Listen now!
Episode 34: Boston in the Golden Age of Piracy, part 1
Shiver me timbers! This is the first in a two-part series about Boston’s role in the Golden Age of Piracy, from 1650 to 1726. A few pirates set sail from our city, some preyed on the shipping coming in and out of our port, and even more met their ends on the gallows in Boston. We’ll hear stories of daring raids and buried treasures, of mutiny, jailbreak, and double crossing.
Continue reading Episode 34: Boston in the Golden Age of Piracy, part 1