Author: jake

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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Boston Standard Time (episode 113)

With New Year’s Eve comes the ball drop in Times Square at the stroke of midnight.  But in the late 1800s, Boston dropped a ball every day to mark the stroke of noon, because telling the time was serious business. The time ball, along with telegraphic signals and fire alarm bells, announced the exact time to the public, at a time when the exact time was critical to navigation on the high seas and safety on the newfangled railroads.  With ultra-precise clocks made by local jewelers and true astronomical time announced daily by the Harvard Observatory, Boston Standard Time became the de facto standard for a wide swath of the country long before time zones were officially proposed and adopted.


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Abolitionism on Trial (episode 112)

Boston abolitionists rallied in response to the Fugitive Slave Act, ushering in an era of more active resistance that we chronicled in episodes 15-17. This week, we’re spotlighting the role that Theodore Parker, a radically liberal Unitarian minister, played in securing the safety of self-emancipated African Americans and inciting the city to oppose slavery with violence if necessary.


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