Tag: 18th Century

Harvard’s Thanksgiving Day Riot (episode 107)

When it comes to Boston history, it seems like there’s a riot for every possible season.  It’s Thanksgiving season now, so this week we’re going to discuss a riot that took place at Harvard University… not during the tumultuous anti-war protests of the 1960s or 1970s, but on Thanksgiving day in 1787.  There’s tantalizingly little in the historical record about what happened or how it started, but we know that some very famous historical figures were right in the middle of the action.


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Riot Classics (episode 101)

For this week’s show, we’re revisiting three highlights from Boston’s long and storied history of rioting. We’ll include stories from past episodes covering the 1919 Boston police strike, 1747 impressment riots, and the 1837 Broad Street riot.


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The Occupation of Boston (episode 100)

250 years ago this week, British troops landed in Boston.  Author J.L. Bell joins us to discuss the British government’s decision to send troops in an attempt to keep peace after Boston’s years of upheaval.  Instead of bringing peace, the tense occupation would culminate in the Boston Massacre less than two years later.

Listen to the end to find out how you can get some free HUB History swag in celebration of our 100th episode!


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Folk Magic and Mysteries at the Fairbanks House (episode 93)

In this episode, we’re joined by the curator of one of the oldest houses in North America.  He’ll tell us about evidence that’s been uncovered that generations of residents may have believed in an ancient form of countermagic.  The inhabitants of Dedham’s Fairbanks House used charms and hex marks deriving from Puritan, Catholic, and pagan religious traditions in an attempt to ward off evil forces that might have included witches, demons, and even disease.  Fairbanks House Museum curator Daniel Neff will join us to explain the evidence he’s found and what it can tell us about the Fairbanks family and the world they lived in.


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When Darkness Veiled the Sky (episode 85)

This week’s show relates three incidents across three centuries when daytime turned to darkness in the skies over Boston.  They weren’t solar eclipses.  Instead, they were a different natural phenomenon, one that was completely unpredictable and each time led to speculation that the end of the world was at hand.  


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The Sacred Cod (episode 81)

Meet the Sacred Cod, a five foot long wooden fish, carved and painted to resemble a cod. The mighty cod holds great prominence in Massachusetts history, as cod fishing was the first industry practiced by Europeans in the region. For perhaps 270 years or more, the Sacred Cod has served as a sort of mascot for the state House of Representatives, except for two days in 1933, when it went inexplicably missing.


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Pirate Classics (episode 80)

Arrrr, matey!  Nikki and I are running a pirate themed relay race on Cape Cod this weekend instead of recording a new episode, so of course we’re going to play three classic pirate stories this week.  The first two clips will highlight the role Boston played in the golden age of piracy, while the third discusses Puritan minister Cotton Mather’s complicated relationship with the pirates whose execution he oversaw.  Listen now!


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Paul Revere’s Not-So-Famous Rides (Ep76)

In honor of Patriots Day and the anniversary of Paul Revere’s famous ride, we are focusing on some of Paul Revere’s less famous rides this week. When Paul Revere set out to warn the Provincial Congress that the British Regulars were coming in April of 1775, it wasn’t his first gig as an express rider for the patriots. For almost three years, he had been carrying messages from the Boston Committee of Correspondence on horseback to patriots in New York, Philadelphia, New Hampshire, and beyond.  It’s just that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow didn’t write poems about the other rides.


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Pope’s Night, Remastered (Ep75)

This week, we’re revisiting the bizarre holiday known as Pope’s Night that was celebrated in early Boston.  Having evolved out of the British observation of Guy Fawkes Day, Boston took the event to extremes.  The virulently anti-Catholic colonists in our town held festive bonfires, parades, and plenty of drinking.  Almost every year, the celebration would lead to massive street fights and riots that sometimes turned deadly, all to commemorate a thwarted plot against the British Parliament.  Pope’s Night was the subject of our very first podcast, and we’re happy to revisit it here with better research, more practiced storytelling, and hopefully better audio quality.


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Original Sin: The Roots of Slavery in Boston (Ep74)

The Boston slave trade began when a ship arrived in the harbor in the summer of 1638 carrying a cargo of enslaved Africans, but there was already a history of slave ownership in the new colony.  After this early experience, Massachusetts would continue to be a slave owning colony for almost 150 years.  In this week’s episode, we discuss the origins of African slavery in Massachusetts and compare the experience of enslaved Africans to other forms of unfree labor in Boston, such as enslaved Native Americans, Scottish prisoners of war, and indentured servants.  

Warning: This week’s episode uses some of the racialized language of our 17th and 18th century sources, and it describes an act of sexual violence.


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