Category: Episodes

Dr. Rebecca Crumpler, Forgotten No Longer (episode 200)

Dr. Rebecca Davis Lee Crumpler was the first Black woman to earn a medical degree in the US in 1864, and she spent most of her adult life in Charlestown, Beacon Hill, and the Readville section of Hyde Park.  She devoted her career to pediatrics and obstetrics, published the first medical text by an African American author, and made a point of caring for the marginalized, even moving to Virginia to tend to formerly enslaved people at the end of the Civil War.  The nation’s first Black female physician lay in an unmarked grave for 125 years, but there have been important developments in the story of Dr. Crumpler while we’ve been in quarantine this year.


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The Clipper Ships of East Boston (episode 199)

Kick back and enjoy our interview with Stephen Ujifusa, author of Barons of the Sea, and Their Race to Build the World’s Fastest Clipper Ship, which originally aired in July 2018.  Stephen takes us back to an era when the fastest, most elegant ships in the world were built in the East Boston shipyard of Donald McKay.  He also describes how they were used to trade for tea in China or gold in California, and how they helped America’s most prominent families amass fortunes through opium smuggling.  


Continue reading The Clipper Ships of East Boston (episode 199)

When the US Army Invaded South Boston (episode 198)

In the 1940s, Boston was still an industrial city, and when the US entered World War II, that industrial might would be turned to wartime production. With industry comes labor disputes, and a new government agency was given extraordinary powers to resolve them. In other early cases, the National War Labor Board used its authority and the might of the military to break strikes by organized labor. However, in August 1942, they would step in to force an employer to honor their union contract, using the US Army to enforce workers’ rights. That employer was the SA Woods Machine Company of South Boston, and this Wednesday marks the anniversary of the military takeover of their plant, setting up an epic battle of wills between the SA Woods corporation and the US government, and between the company’s cantankerous president and the young major sent to take over his company.


Continue reading When the US Army Invaded South Boston (episode 198)

The Grand Derangement (episode 197)

One morning in August, redcoats fanned out across the province, taking entire families into custody, burning farms and crops, and killing livestock.  Falling in the middle of two centuries of intermittent warfare, this grand derangement, or great upheaval, didn’t take place in Boston or even in Massachusetts.  But Boston bore responsibility for the acts carried out in its name, and Boston would host the “French Neutrals,” the human byproducts of the purge that we remember as the expulsion of the Acadians who were confined in our city for nearly a decade.


Continue reading The Grand Derangement (episode 197)

The Gold Gilded Grasshopper (episode 196)

Faneuil Hall’s grasshopper weathervane is 4 feet long, weighs about 80 pounds, and is made out of copper that’s been covered with 23 carat gold. It’s found at the top of an 8 foot spire above Faneuil Hall’s cupola, which is in turn seven stories above ground level. So imagine the surprise that swept Boston on a January day in 1974 when people looked up and realized that the grasshopper was gone.  


Continue reading The Gold Gilded Grasshopper (episode 196)

Boston Goes to Bleeding Kansas (episode 195)

Bleeding Kansas was a deadly guerrilla war between so-called Border Ruffians from Missouri in support of slavery on one side, and earnest abolitionists from New England on the other.  The violence peaked on Kansas prairies in the decade before the US Civil War officially began, fought with guns, newspapers, artillery, and sometimes even broadswords.  A Boston-based company seeded those earnest abolitionists into that prairie and eventually looked the other way as they transformed themselves from farmers to vigilantes and soldiers.


Continue reading Boston Goes to Bleeding Kansas (episode 195)

The Prisoners of Peddocks Island (episode 194)

You may have heard stories about the Confederate prisoners who were held at Fort Warren on Georges Island during the civil war.  In this episode, we’ll explore a different island that housed prisoners during a different war.  Our story will start with the only soccer riot in recorded Boston history, which broke out at Carson Beach in South Boston on July 16, 1944.  It will end up with Italian war prisoners confined at Fort Andrews on Peddocks Island in Boston Harbor.  Along the way, we’ll meet bootleggers, artillerymen, Passamaquoddy seal hunters, opium fiends, and Portuguese-American fishermen.  We’ll also be taking a virtual visit to one of my personal favorite places in the Boston area, and one that is on the brink of being sold off to luxury hotel developers.


Continue reading The Prisoners of Peddocks Island (episode 194)

Prescott Townsend, From the First World War to the First Pride Parade, with Theo Linger (episode 193)

Prescott Townsend was one of the most interesting figures in Boston’s LGBTQ history.  He was the ultimate Boston Brahmin, coming of age at Harvard in the shadow of Teddy Roosevelt and enlisting in the Navy during World War I. He served time in prison after getting caught in a Beacon Hill tryst back when homosexuality was a crime in Boston, and spent decades as an activist, helping to found the gay liberation movement, and marched at the head of the nation’s first pride parade on the first anniversary of Stonewall.  We’re also going to meet a researcher who has uncovered new information about Prescott Townsend as part of an effort to improve how the National Park Service interprets the LGBTQ history of Boston.


Continue reading Prescott Townsend, From the First World War to the First Pride Parade, with Theo Linger (episode 193)

A People’s Guide to Greater Boston, with Joseph Nevins and Suren Moodliar (episode 192)

A People’s Guide to Greater Boston is a new kind of guidebook to Boston and surrounding towns.  Instead of giving an overview of the Freedom Trail and introducing readers to the hot restaurants and hotels of Boston, this guide uncovers the forgotten stories of radicals and activists hidden in every neighborhood and suburb.  It has sections covering Boston’s urban core, the neighborhoods, adjoining towns, and suburbs from Brockton to Haverhill.  In each section, the authors unearth a wide range of sites, and in some cases former sites, that are tied to Black, indigenous, labor, or other radical historic events and figures.  For listeners who complain that our normal episodes are too political, or our point of view is too liberal… well, sorry in advance.  This guide definitely doesn’t keep politics out of history, and its point of view is well to the left of our usual editorial voice.


Continue reading A People’s Guide to Greater Boston, with Joseph Nevins and Suren Moodliar (episode 192)

Pamphlets, Statues, and the Selling of Joseph (episode 191)

In June 1700, a brief pamphlet titled The Selling of Joseph was published in Boston.  It’s considered the first abolitionist tract to be published in what’s now the United States.  Authored by Salem witch trial judge Samuel Sewall, the three page pamphlet uses biblical references to argue that enslaving another person could never be considered moral.  Listen to find out what motivated Sewall to write the tract, how his peers in Boston reacted to it, and what its effect was on the wider world.  In light of recent events, we’ll also consider the current debate around statues and their removal.  


Continue reading Pamphlets, Statues, and the Selling of Joseph (episode 191)