Tag: Harbor Islands

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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Episode 51: The Confederates on Boston Harbor

During the Civil War, thousands of Confederate soldiers, diplomats, and politicians were imprisoned behind the walls of Fort Warren on Georges Island. Today, the fort is home to the only Confederate monument in Massachusetts, but not for much longer.

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Episode 36 Boston in the Golden Age of Piracy, Part 2

In this episode, we continue our tale of Boston in the Golden Age of Piracy, picking up at the end of the War of The Spanish Succession.  We’ll learn about some of the most fearsome and notorious pirates in history, as well as one of the most ineffective.  We’ll see how one of these pirates gave a founding father his start in public life, which US president’s great grandfather bought a former pirate as a slave, and what other president’s great grandfather decapitated a pirate with an axe.  

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Episode 19: A Tale of Two Hermits

This week’s episode examines two people who chose to live as hermits in and around Boston.  When you think of a hermit, your mental image is probably a monk or an aging eccentric in a cabin in the woods somewhere.  But our subjects this week sought out that kind of solitary existence among the hustle and bustle of the growing city of Boston in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  James Gately was known as the Hermit of Hyde Park, and Ann Winsor Sherwin was the Hermit of Boston Harbor.  Listen to the show to meet these unique characters!

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Episode 5: Secret Nazis on Boston Harbor!

At the end of World War II, the Allied powers raced across Germany, competing to capture technology related to Nazi super-weapons and the scientists who developed them.  The US military operated a secret program that located high-value scientists, smuggling them into the US and falsifying their wartime records.  For many of the scientists who went on to work on the Manhattan Project or the space race, their first stop in America was a secret base in Boston Harbor.

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