Episode 53: The Radical Heywoods

This week’s show profiles Angela and Ezra Heywood: writers, activists, free-love advocates, suffragists, socialists, labor reformers, and abolitionists who shocked the sensibilities of Victorian Boston.

The Radical Heywoods

This Week in Boston History

  • November 6, 1894: “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald becomes the first Irish-American Congressman from Massachusetts.  Read of how he met the future Rose Fizgerald Kennedy as a result of the campaign.
  • November 7, 1916: Boston Elevated Railway car 393 plunges through an open drawbridge into Fort Point Channel, killing 47. Read coverage from the next morning’s Globe.
  • November 8, 1861: The Trent Affair occurs, in which a Union captain stops and boards a British ship to arrest Confederate “diplomats,” who will be imprisoned on Boston Harbor. Learn more in Episode 51.
  • November 9, 1775: Pennsylvania riflemen march a quarter mile through ice cold water to push back a British foraging party, near the location of today’s Cambridgeside Galleria.
  • November 10, 1771: Future Continental general Israel Putnam shares a classic joke with John Adams. Do you know the one about the innkeeper, the Indian, and the hogshead of rum?
  • November 11, 1630: The Puritan settlers of Boston tell two strangers who want to settle here, essentially, “You can’t sit with us!
  • November 12, 1928: Amelia Earhart returns to Dennison House, where she had worked as a social worker, after becoming famous as the first woman to fly across the Atlantic.

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