Author: jake

The Lioness of Boston, with Emily Franklin (episode 283)

Isabella Stewart Gardner was a consummate collector, generous philanthropist, and rabid Red Sox fan.  Today, she’s best known as the namesake of an art museum in Boston’s Fenway neighborhood (and if we’re being honest, the museum is probably best known for a famous 1990 heist).  This week, Jake interviews author Emily Franklin, whose new novel The Lioness of Boston explores the person behind the Gardner fortune.  They discuss the great romance, tragedy, and scandal of Isabella’s life, the different personas she tried on throughout different eras of her life, and her obsession with the idea of a legacy.  Emily will tell us why Boston at first turned up its nose at wealthy young Isabella, but later came to embrace the flamboyant and eccentric Mrs Jack as one of our most colorful and generous characters. Emily will also describe what makes historical fiction different from biography, and the freedom and limitations that the genre brings.  


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Disasters and Disaster Response (episode 282)

Enjoy two classic stories this week. First up is the story of the Cocoanut Grove fire. In November 1942, Boston was on a wartime footing, business was booming, and the streets were packed with soldiers and sailors on their way to fronts around the world. On the Saturday after Thanksgiving, a fire broke out at the popular Cocoanut Grove nightclub, and in the moments that followed, 492 people were killed, making it Boston’s most deadly disaster. After that, the podcast visits December 1917, when another world war raged in Europe. When confusing reports of a disaster to the north reached Boston, the city sprang into action, loading a special train with doctors, nurses, and medical supplies. After the most massive explosion before the advent of the atom bomb, Boston rushed relief to the town of Halifax. In return, they send us a Christmas tree each year.

We have disasters on the mind because of the terrible, deadly fires on Maui. We just replayed a story about how deeply connected Boston is to Lahaina in episode 280, but if you want to hear it on its own, you can go back to episode 220 to learn how the ancient royal dynasty of Maui had its seat in Lahaina, how King Kamehameha moved his royal court to Lahaina after conquering Maui, and how whalers, merchants, and Congregational missionaries from Boston gathered there during the colonial era. The survivors need food, clean water, and housing in the immediate short term, and they will have to rebuild their lives from scratch in one of the most expensive places in the country. Please consider donating toward Maui relief. I would recommend the Maui Food Bank, to help families in need, or the Maui Humane Society, who are reuniting lost pets with their families, feeding homeless animals, and providing veterinary care. Continue reading Disasters and Disaster Response (episode 282)

JFK and PT-109, 80 years later

80 years ago this month, on a tiny Pacific island, a legend was born. In the darkness before dawn on August 2, 1943, a Japanese destroyer rammed and sank a small, plywood boat commanded by a 26 year old Lieutenant Junior Grade named John Fitzgerald Kennedy. In the hours and days that followed, young Jack Kennedy would prove to be a true American hero, swimming mile after mile through shark and crocodile infested waters, while towing an injured crew member by a strap clenched in his teeth.  In the ensuing decades, PT-109 has become one of the most famous small craft in US Navy history, largely due to Kennedy’s actions.  However, it also became a craven political ploy, when JFK and his father Joseph Kennedy used the story of PT-109 to launch a political career that would carry Jack Kennedy to the Oval Office.


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Bostonians on the Pacific (episode 280)

This week, enjoy three classic stories about Bostonians and their adventures on the Pacific Ocean.  First, we’ll hear about the voyages of the Columbia to the Pacific Northwest starting in 1787, then we’ll move on to the Congregational missionaries who descended on Hawaii in 1823, and finally, we’ll talk about the Boston whaler who brought the industrial revolution to Spanish California.  While you’re listening to these three classic stories, see if you can figure out what I’m working on that would involve a Brookline native on a small boat in the Solomon Islands in August 1943!


Continue reading Bostonians on the Pacific (episode 280)

Granite, Glass, and the Construction of King’s Chapel (episode 279)

This week’s story ties one of modern Boston’s iconic Freedom Trail sites to the earliest days of English settlement in the Shawmut Peninsula.  It’s a story that ties the first Puritan to die in Boston to the hated Royal governor Edmund Andros, and it ties some of the earliest non-English immigrants in Boston to Ben Franklin and Abigail Adams through the invention of two local industries.  King’s Chapel is beloved in Boston today, but it was seen as an unwelcome invasion when it was first proposed in 1686.  In this week’s show, we’ll look at how Boston found room for an unwanted church, how the church was reinvented three times, and how it launched local glassmaking and founded the granite industry in Quincy.  We’ll also see where you can still find the last traces of the original, wooden King’s Chapel hiding inside the walls of a more modern church, but not here in Boston.


Continue reading Granite, Glass, and the Construction of King’s Chapel (episode 279)

The Adamses Declare Independence (episode 278)

Between the John Adams miniseries on HBO and the musical 1776, everyone knows that John Adams was one of the leading voices for independence in the Continental Congress.  And along with negotiating the treaty of Paris and keeping the US out of the Quasi War, Adams always considered the Declaration one of his chief accomplishments.  50 years after Congress adopted it, John Adams remembered it on the morning of July 4, 1826, remarking “it is a great day. It is a good day.”  That evening, he died, with many sources reporting that his last words were “Jefferson still lives.”  He was wrong, though.  Earlier that day, Jefferson had woken briefly, asked “is it the fourth” and then declined further medical treatment before slipping into a coma and himself dying.  For someone who was so closely associated with America’s founding document, why did John Adams believe we should celebrate it on July 2nd?  And how did his closest and most trusted advisor, his wife Abigail, urge him on toward independence in a letter that history remembers for other reasons?  Let’s find out!


Continue reading The Adamses Declare Independence (episode 278)

Thomas Jefferson in Boston (episode 277)

Thomas Jefferson visited Boston in 1784, arriving in town on June 18th.  That also happened to be the same day when Abigail Adams left her home in Quincy to start making her way to France to join John at his diplomatic posting, though her ship didn’t actually leave Boston until the next day.  In this episode, we’ll explore how the friendship that was kindled during their single day together in Boston carried on through their shared months in France, their decades of correspondence, and even through the years when Jefferson and John Adams were feuding.  We’ll also examine Thomas Jefferson as an early New England tourist, who explored not only Boston, but also New Haven, Portsmouth, and other key regional population centers, as well as taking a fun look at his epic Boston shopping spree just days before he too boarded a boat to Europe.


Continue reading Thomas Jefferson in Boston (episode 277)

Revolution’s Edge, with Patrick Gabridge and Nikki Stewart (episode 276)

The new play “Revolution’s Edge” will debut at Old North Church in June 2023.  It tells the story of three Bostonians and their families on the eve of the Revolution.  Mather Byles is the Loyalist rector of Old North Church, Cato is an African American man who’s enslaved by Byles, and John Pulling is a whiggish ship’s captain and member of the Old North vestry.  The three men have very different stations in life, but they all have young families with intertwined lives, and on April 18, 1775, they all had very different decisions to make about those lives.  My guests this week are Patrick Gabridge, producing artistic director of the Plays in Place theater company, and Nikki Stewart, executive director of Old North Illuminated.  Together, they’ll tell us how this, um, revolutionary new drama came to be.


Continue reading Revolution’s Edge, with Patrick Gabridge and Nikki Stewart (episode 276)

The Lost Viking City on the Charles (episode 275)

If you walk down Mount Auburn Street in Cambridge, you might notice a small stone marker that states, “on this spot in the year 1000, Leif Erikson built his house in Vineland.”  You might be surprised to learn that Leif Erikson had a house in Cambridge, and if so, you’ll be even more surprised to learn that the lower Charles River was the seat of a thriving Norse city around the turn of the first millennium.  Learn about Harvard professor Eben Norton Horsford’s theory that the legendary Viking city of Norumbega was situated along the Charles River in this week’s podcast!


Continue reading The Lost Viking City on the Charles (episode 275)

The Schuyler Sisters in Boston (episode 274)

Thanks to the Hamilton musical, it’s almost impossible to hear the names Angelica, Eliza, and Peggy without bursting into song.  The play made the three eldest daughters of Philip Schuyler famous, and in this episode we’re talking about the first two sisters, but mostly just Angelica.  Fans know that there was a flirtation between Angelica and Hamilton, but that relationship was exaggerated for the show.  Angelica’s actual romance and marriage were downplayed for the show, but it was this union that brought Angelica Schuyler Church to Boston, where she lived for over two years under an assumed name.  What was she doing here, and who was the mysterious John Carter who escorted her here? 


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