Category: Episodes

The Middlesex Canal: Boston’s First Big Dig (episode 225)

In the last decade of the 18th century, a group of investors called the Proprietors of the Middlesex Canal turned a crazy idea into reality.  After some initial stumbles, they were able to successfully build a navigational canal from Boston Harbor to the Merrimack River in Lowell.  In an era before highways and airports, it became the first practical freight link between the markets and wharves of Boston and the vast interior of New England in Central Massachusetts and New Hampshire.  Against all odds, it was a success, and an unparalleled feat of engineering.  However, its perceived success was short lived, with the coming of the railroad spelling doom for the canal business and commercial failure for the Proprietors.


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The Liberty Riot (episode 224)

On June 10, 1768 a riot swept through Boston that forced Royal officials to flee for their lives, saw a boat bodily carried onto the Common and burned, and in the end helped bring on the Boston Massacre less than two years later.  John Hancock, later a prominent patriot and owner of America’s most famous signature, was at the center of the controversy.  Known then as a leading merchant and possibly the richest man in the British colonies, Hancock would find himself on trial as a smuggler before a court that was originally set up to deal with pirates and defended by none other than future President John Adams.


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The Mysterious Murder (Maybe) of Starr Faithful (episode 223)

When Starr Faithfull’s body washed up on a Long Island beach 90 years ago, the case became a national obsession.  At the center of the story was a beautiful young flapper, with a diary full of covert sexual conquests, a sordid history with a prominent politician, and a drug and booze fueled nightlife in the speakeasies of two major cities.  Was her death a suicide, driven by her dark past?  A tragic accident after one too many?  Or was it something darker, a murder for hire on behalf of a former Boston mayor… or his underworld adversaries?


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Julia Child, from the OSS to PBS (episode 222)

At the outbreak of World War II, president Roosevelt decided to create a single centralized agency to organize the nation’s many competing intelligence services. Not the CIA, which would come a few years later, but the Office of Strategic Services. Before the CIA, the OSS was America’s chief spy service. And before Julia Child was a famous chef on PBS, young Julia McWilliams was recruited by the OSS, where she traveled the world and fell in love with Paul Child and exotic food. Listen to this week’s episode to learn about Julia Child at war: how she was recruited and trained, where she served in the Asian theater of war, and why that experience helped lead her to a Cambridge house with its now famous kitchen.


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Boy Wonder Arrested as Ringleader when Reds Riot in Roxbury (episode 221)

On May Day in 1919, Roxbury socialists marched in support of a textile workers’ strike in Lawrence.  The afternoon turned violent, with police firing shots to disperse the crowd.  In the aftermath, two officers were killed and a mob formed that hunted down and viciously beat many of the marchers.  As the smoke cleared, it became evident that one of the leaders of the march was a celebrity: William James Sidis, the boy wonder.


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Puritans in Paradise (episode 220)

In the 1820s, waves of Christian missionaries were dispatched from Boston, believing they might never return.  They didn’t know much about the land they were going to settle in or the people they were trying to convert, but what little they had heard was frightening.  The missionaries came from a church that was directly descended from the harsh Christianity of the Puritans, and they were on their way to a land where the people worshipped a pantheon of many gods.  From a society where both men and women were basically always covered from neck to ankles, they were going to a land where the people wore tattoos and very little else.  They had heard rumors of graven idols and human sacrifice, and believed they were on their way to do battle with the devil himself.  Many of them believed that they were being sent into the gates of hell, but they were on their way to heaven on earth itself… the Kingdom of Hawaii.


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Expo 76: Future Vision or Fever Dream? (episode 219)

During the Kennedy administration, a group of Boston businessmen led by a millionaire dairy farmer hatched an audacious plan.  They proposed building an experimental city of the future on made land, piers, and floating platforms connecting Columbia Point in Dorchester with Thompson Island in Boston Harbor.  This new city would be the site of a World’s Fair timed to celebrate America’s Bicentennial, and the site would then be reused to solve all of Boston’s problems with housing, race relations, environmental damage, and economic decline.  Spoiler alert: We don’t have a futuristic city connecting Columbia Point with the Harbor Islands.  But the story of how a plan ripped straight out of science fiction almost came to be built in Boston reveals a lot about an optimistic city torn apart by the busing crisis.


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Disaster at Bussey Bridge (episode 218)

March 14 is the anniversary of one of the worst railroad accidents that ever happened in Massachusetts.  On March 14, 1887, a train filled with suburban commuters was on its way from Dedham to Park Square station in Boston, stopping in West Roxbury and Roslindale along the way.  Moments before it would have passed through Forest Hills, disaster struck.  By the time the engineer turned around, he saw a cloud of dust and a pile of twisted rubble where nine passenger cars should have been.  In a split second, a normal morning commute was transformed into a nightmare of death and dismemberment for hundreds of passengers.


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Richard T Greener and the White Problem (episode 217)

Professor Richard T Greener grew up in Boston in the shadow of the abolition movement, graduated from Harvard, and became one of the foremost Black intellectuals of his era.  However, soon after publishing his most influential work, when it seemed like he would take up the mantle of Frederick Douglass, he instead sank into obscurity.  He was nearly forgotten for over a century, until his legacy was rediscovered in 2009 in a discarded steamer trunk in a dusty attic on the South Side of Chicago.


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Demanding Satisfaction: Dueling in Boston (episode 216)

A little more than three years ago, cohost emerita Nikki and I were on our way to see the Hamilton musical for the first time.  In our excitement, we decided to record an episode about an 1806 political duel in Boston that had a lot of parallels with the Hamilton-Burr duel.  We dug into the history of dueling in Boston, how dueling laws evolved in response to the duels that were fought here, and why a young Boston Democratic-Republican and a young Boston Federalist decided they had to fight each other to the death in Rhode Island.  Unfortunately, we also peppered samples from the Hamilton soundtrack throughout the episode in our excitement, stomping all over Lin Manuel’s intellectual property.  The unlicensed music even got the episode pulled from at least one podcast app.  This week, I went back to our original recording and re-edited it to clean it up and remove all the Hamiltunes.  So get ready to meet Charles Sumner’s dad and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s dad, sail on the USS Constitution, and Alexander Hamilton himself will even put in a brief appearance.  Plus, we’ll learn why fighting a duel in Massachusetts could get you buried at a crossroads with a stake driven through your heart. 


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