HUB History - Our Favorite Stories from Boston History Podcast

HUB History - Our Favorite Stories from Boston History

HUB History
Where two history buffs go far beyond the Freedom Trail to share our favorite stories from the history of Boston, the hub of the universe.
Bonus: Race Over Party, with Millington Bergeson-Lockwood
For Black History Month, I'm replaying some classic podcast episodes. Historian Millington Bergeson-Lockwood, author of Race Over Party: Black Politics and Partisanship in Late Nineteenth-Century Boston, joins us this week to talk about the evolution of partisanship and political loyalty among Boston’s African American community, from just after the Civil War until the turn of the 20th century. It was a period that at first promised political and economic advancement for African Americans, but ended with the rise of lynching and codified Jim Crow laws. It was also a period that began with near universal support for Lincoln’s Republican party among African Americans, with Frederick Douglass commenting “the Republican party is the ship and all else is the sea.” However, after decades of setbacks and roadblocks on the path of progress, many began to question their support of the GOP, and some tried to forge a new, non-partisan path to Black advancement. Dr. Bergeson-Lockwood will tell us how the movement developed and whether it ultimately achieved its goals. Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/154
Feb 10
Martin Luther King’s Boston, with Dr. Imari Paris Jeffries
This week, Dr. Imari Paris Jeffries joins us to talk about the years when Martin Luther King, Jr lived in Boston. As you’ll hear him say in just a few minutes, Dr. King is a figure that most of us only imagine as a grainy newsreel image or a voice crackling on an old recording, so it can be hard to imagine Dr. King as flesh and blood. With Dr. Paris Jeffries help, we’re going to imagine the Boston that Reverend King experienced: where he studied, where he fell in love with Coretta Scott, and where he would return over a decade later, when he had already become a legend in his own time. Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/320/ Support us: http://patreon.com/HUBhistory/
Feb 9
49 min
The Silenced Muse: Emily Hale, T.S. Eliot, and the Role of a Lifetime, with Sara Fitzgerald
In this episode, Sara Fitzgerald joins us to discuss her new book The Silenced Muse: Emily Hale, T.S. Eliot, and the Role of a Lifetime. It is the first book-length biography of Emily Hale, the longtime love and secret creative muse of poet T.S. Eliot, who wrote Emily Hale over 1100 letters over the decades of their complicated relationship. However, their relationship was mostly forgotten by history after their letters were locked away for 50 years after their deaths, to protect the innocent. By the time the archive was opened in January 2020, few scholars understood the depth of their relationship. This book reestablishes Hale, not only as a major influence on T.S. Eliot’s body of work, but also as her own woman. From Hale’s upbringing in Chestnut Hill to their first flirtation in a Harvard Square parlor, Fitzgerald traces the intertwining lives of Hale and Eliot over a half a century that revolves around the intellectual center of gravity that is Boston. Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/319/ Support us: http://patreon.com/HUBhistory/
Jan 26
1 hr 27 min
Beastly Boston
Lions and tigers and bears, oh my! This week, we’re talking about Boston’s first encounters with exotic animals. I will be talking about the very first lion to make an appearance in Boston, but instead of tigers and bears, we’ll take a look at Boston’s experiences with elephants and alligators. Our story will span almost 200 years, with the first lion being imported in the early 1700s, the first elephant in the late 1700s, and the first alligators that most Bostonians got acquainted with were installed in the Public Garden in 1901. Can you imagine proper late-Victorian Bostonians crowding around a pool of alligators to watch them tear live animals limb from limb? I couldn’t either before digging into this week’s episode. Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/318/ Support us: http://patreon.com/HUBhistory/
Jan 12
57 min
Boston Pre- and Post-Roe
Thirty years ago this week, Brookline became the site of the most deadly anti-abortion violence in American history, at least up to that point. Sadly, right wing extremists and religious terrorists have since eclipsed the bloodshed on Beacon Street on December 30, 1994. On that day, two women’s health clinics were targeted by a radical with a gun because, along with pap smears, birth control, and STD screenings, they provided abortion care. His shooting spree left two people dead, five wounded, and fit into a national pattern of violence against abortion providers. This week, we’ll review that heartbreaking case, then we’ll revisit a classic episode that warns us what could happen to pregnant women in Boston before Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in America through the tragic example of Jennie Clarke. Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/317/ Support us: http://patreon.com/HUBhistory/
Dec 29, 2024
52 min
Christmas 3: The Original War on Christmas
For our third Christmas episode, we’re setting our clocks back to the year 1659. If you’d been alive in Boston back then, you would want to keep your Christmas celebration under wraps, because that was the year when Puritan Boston banned Christmas. Now, that may not fit with your mental image of the Puritans as a deeply religious group, but that’s exactly why they literally erased Christmas from their calendars and banned its celebration for decades. Puritans saw their road to salvation as paved with hard labor, careful study of scripture, and the denial of earthly pleasure, but at the time, Christmas was known as a season of misrule, mummery, mad mirth, and rude revelling. Original show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/212
Dec 25, 2024
56 min
Christmas 2: The Christmas Eve Execution
Today's Christmas bonus is anything but merry. In the depths of the British occupation of Boston in 1774, British Private William Ferguson played hooky on a December day, got really drunk while his unit was on a routine patrol, and then he either tried to desert and start a new life here in America, or he went to see about getting some laundry done. Either way, he was convicted of deserting from his royal majesty’s army, and Boston was shocked to bear witness to an execution by firing squad in the middle of Boston Common, bright and early on Christmas Eve. Original show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/263/
Dec 24, 2024
38 min
Christmas 1: The Halifax Tree
This week, I'm sharing three past episodes to keep you warm on your Christmas travels. For the first one, let’s set the clock back to December 1917, when an ammunition ship blew up in the harbor of Halifax, Nova Scotia, causing the largest explosion before the invention of the atom bomb. The blast left thousands dead, injured, or homeless, in the teeth of a Canadian winter. 500 miles away, a private banker in Boston received a garbled telegram indicating that there was trouble to the north, and within hours Boston responded with manpower, supplies, and funds that forged an unbreakable bond between the two cities. Original show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/57/
Dec 23, 2024
34 min
The First American Christmas Cards
Have you ever wondered where the tradition of sending Christmas cards every year came from?  While the first Christmas cards appeared in Britain back in the 1840s, it was a German immigrant named Louis Prang who made them popular in the United States and around the world.  Using a revolutionary new color printing technique that he called chromolithography, Prang’s Roxbury factory made the most popular greeting cards in the country from the 1870s until the turn of the century.  Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/316/ Support us: http://patreon.com/HUBhistory/
Dec 15, 2024
42 min
Boston Airs America’s First Television Commercial
94 years ago this week, Boston’s second television station aired the first commercial in American history, and they did it almost two decades before Boston’s first television station went on the air. In this episode, we use this blunder and a confusing technological landscape to examine Boston’s pivotal role in the early development of American television. This will be a story of innovation, some of the earliest experimental television broadcasters in the country, and the parallel development of mechanical and electronic television technologies. Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/315/ Support us: http://patreon.com/HUBhistory/
Dec 1, 2024
38 min
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