Tag: 19th Century

Women’s Groups Remaking Boston (episode 150)

This week’s show dusts off two classic stories about times in Boston history when women’s volunteer organizations had a big impact on Boston.  First, we’ll talk about the Massachusetts Emergency and Hygiene Association, whose members introduced the concept of a playground to the American public in late 19th century Boston.  Then, we’ll fast forward a few decades to the 19 – teens, when the Women’ Municipal League sponsored Boston’s first (and so far only ) Rat Day. Both of these projects made valuable contributions to Boston’s quality of life, and they happened at a time when society didn’t generally approve of women’s work outside the home.


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Boston’s Dark Days and Eclipses (episode 145)

The brilliant sunsets and dramatic weather reports inspired by smoke drifting into our area from Canadian wildfires last month got me thinking about two past HUB History shows.  There have been at least three smoke events in Boston history that caused darkness in the middle of the day and made people wonder if the end of the world was coming.  Our first clip will be about the dark days in 1780, 1881, and in 1950. Of course, people who witnessed dark days compared them to solar eclipses.  Our second classic segment is from the summer of 2017, exploring the solar eclipses that early Boston witnessed, from soon after European colonization to the turn of the 19th century. 


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Annexation and Perambulation (episode 141)

This week’s show revisits two classic HUB History episodes that are all about the boundaries of the city of Boston.  First, we’ll go back to a show that originally aired last January to learn why independent towns like Roxbury, Dorchester, and Charlestown were eager to be annexed into the city of Boston in the mid- to late-19th century, and we’ll examine why Boston hasn’t annexed any other municipalities since Hyde Park in 1912.  Of course, once you make the boundaries of the city bigger by annexing your neighbors, you have to keep track of those new boundaries. So our second clip will be from a show that aired way back in September of 2017, about the ancient practice of perambulating the bounds. Since the 1650s, Massachusetts law has required towns to clearly mark their boundaries with other towns, and to send somebody out to walk the line and examine the markers every five years.


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Founding the BSO (episode 139)

Boston has long been known as the Hub of the Universe, but it’s also a hub of world class arts institutions. One of those institutions is the Boston Symphony Orchestra.  This week, we’re looking at the founding of the BSO and the construction of its iconic home, Symphony Hall.  We’ll discuss the characters that brought the BSO and Symphony Hall to life, as well as the remarkable features of the concert hall, known for its near-perfect acoustics.


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Hooker Day in Boston (episode 138)

Hooker Day was a one-time holiday celebrated in Boston in 1903.  While it might sound like this is going to be an X-rated podcast, we’re not talking about that kind of hooker.  Civil War General Joseph “Fighting Joe” Hooker was briefly the commander of the main Union force called the Army of the Potomac.  Forty years after his command, he was immortalized with a massive statue in front of our State House. When the statue was dedicated, the entire city celebrated a holiday that was called Hooker Day in his honor.


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ED Leavitt, Fresh Water, and Steam Power (episode 137)

For centuries before the Quabbin reservoir opened, Boston struggled to provide enough clean, fresh water for its growing population.  One of the solutions to this problem was a new reservoir built at Chestnut Hill in the 1880s. The pumping station at this reservoir was home to enormous steam powered pumping engines, and it’s preserved today as the Metropolitan Waterworks Museum.  Eric Peterson joins us this week to talk about the history of Boston’s water supply, steam power, and a brilliant engineer who designed the steam pumps that provided Boston’s water.


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Boston Marriages in Literature and Life (episode 136)

A new form of relationship arose between 19th century women, which had all the emotional trappings of romantic love, but was long considered to be merely an intense form of friendship.  More recently, however, critics have wondered whether Victorian assumptions about the inherent chasteness of womankind allowed couples who would consider themselves lesbians today to hide in plain sight.

These relationships came to be known as “Boston marriages,” both because a number of high profile Bostonians engaged in them, and because Henry James popularized the concept in his novel The Bostonians.  As the story of the name indicates, real relationships between women were influenced by contemporary literature by James, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Oliver Wendall Holmes, but these authors also drew inspiration from the apparently romantic relationships they saw between women in their lives.


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The Underground Railroad on Boston Harbor (episode 135)

In the 19th century, a network of abolitionists and sympathizers in Boston helped enslaved African Americans find their way to freedom in the Northern states or Canada.  It’s a topic we’ve talked about before, but this time there’s a twist. We’re going to be examining how Boston’s position as an important port city changed the dynamic of seeking freedom.  Jake sat down with National Park Service ranger Shawn Quigley to discuss how the underground railroad ran right through Boston Harbor.


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A Genuine, Bonafide, Non-Electrified Monorail! (episode 133)

You may think taking the T is painful today, but back in the days of horsedrawn streetcars, public transportation was slow, inefficient, and frequently snarled in downtown traffic.  In the 1880s, proposals for elevated railways and subways competed for attention as Boston’s rapid transit solution. Then, an ambitious inventor stormed the scene with a groundbreaking proposal for a monorail. He even went as far as building a mile long track in East Cambridge, showing that the monorail worked. If it hadn’t been for bad luck and bad politics, we might all be taking monorails instead of today’s Red and Orange lines, but instead the monorail turned out to be more of a Shelbyville idea.


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Harnessing the Power of Boston’s Tides (episode 130)

This week, we interview Earl Taylor, president of the Dorchester Historical Society and one of the founders of the Tide Mill Institute.  He tells us how early Bostonians harnessed the power of the tides in Boston Harbor to grind their grain, manufacture products like snuff and spices, and even produce baby carriages.  Plus, he shows us the advantages tidal power had over other types of mills, how tide mills shaped the landscape of Boston, and why tide mills went out of fashion.


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