Category: Episodes

Boy Wonder Arrested as Ringleader when Reds Riot in Roxbury (episode 221)

On May Day in 1919, Roxbury socialists marched in support of a textile workers’ strike in Lawrence.  The afternoon turned violent, with police firing shots to disperse the crowd.  In the aftermath, two officers were killed and a mob formed that hunted down and viciously beat many of the marchers.  As the smoke cleared, it became evident that one of the leaders of the march was a celebrity: William James Sidis, the boy wonder.


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Puritans in Paradise (episode 220)

In the 1820s, waves of Christian missionaries were dispatched from Boston, believing they might never return.  They didn’t know much about the land they were going to settle in or the people they were trying to convert, but what little they had heard was frightening.  The missionaries came from a church that was directly descended from the harsh Christianity of the Puritans, and they were on their way to a land where the people worshipped a pantheon of many gods.  From a society where both men and women were basically always covered from neck to ankles, they were going to a land where the people wore tattoos and very little else.  They had heard rumors of graven idols and human sacrifice, and believed they were on their way to do battle with the devil himself.  Many of them believed that they were being sent into the gates of hell, but they were on their way to heaven on earth itself… the Kingdom of Hawaii.


Continue reading Puritans in Paradise (episode 220)

Expo 76: Future Vision or Fever Dream? (episode 219)

During the Kennedy administration, a group of Boston businessmen led by a millionaire dairy farmer hatched an audacious plan.  They proposed building an experimental city of the future on made land, piers, and floating platforms connecting Columbia Point in Dorchester with Thompson Island in Boston Harbor.  This new city would be the site of a World’s Fair timed to celebrate America’s Bicentennial, and the site would then be reused to solve all of Boston’s problems with housing, race relations, environmental damage, and economic decline.  Spoiler alert: We don’t have a futuristic city connecting Columbia Point with the Harbor Islands.  But the story of how a plan ripped straight out of science fiction almost came to be built in Boston reveals a lot about an optimistic city torn apart by the busing crisis.


Continue reading Expo 76: Future Vision or Fever Dream? (episode 219)

Disaster at Bussey Bridge (episode 218)

March 14 is the anniversary of one of the worst railroad accidents that ever happened in Massachusetts.  On March 14, 1887, a train filled with suburban commuters was on its way from Dedham to Park Square station in Boston, stopping in West Roxbury and Roslindale along the way.  Moments before it would have passed through Forest Hills, disaster struck.  By the time the engineer turned around, he saw a cloud of dust and a pile of twisted rubble where nine passenger cars should have been.  In a split second, a normal morning commute was transformed into a nightmare of death and dismemberment for hundreds of passengers.


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Richard T Greener and the White Problem (episode 217)

Professor Richard T Greener grew up in Boston in the shadow of the abolition movement, graduated from Harvard, and became one of the foremost Black intellectuals of his era.  However, soon after publishing his most influential work, when it seemed like he would take up the mantle of Frederick Douglass, he instead sank into obscurity.  He was nearly forgotten for over a century, until his legacy was rediscovered in 2009 in a discarded steamer trunk in a dusty attic on the South Side of Chicago.


Continue reading Richard T Greener and the White Problem (episode 217)

Demanding Satisfaction: Dueling in Boston (episode 216)

A little more than three years ago, cohost emerita Nikki and I were on our way to see the Hamilton musical for the first time.  In our excitement, we decided to record an episode about an 1806 political duel in Boston that had a lot of parallels with the Hamilton-Burr duel.  We dug into the history of dueling in Boston, how dueling laws evolved in response to the duels that were fought here, and why a young Boston Democratic-Republican and a young Boston Federalist decided they had to fight each other to the death in Rhode Island.  Unfortunately, we also peppered samples from the Hamilton soundtrack throughout the episode in our excitement, stomping all over Lin Manuel’s intellectual property.  The unlicensed music even got the episode pulled from at least one podcast app.  This week, I went back to our original recording and re-edited it to clean it up and remove all the Hamiltunes.  So get ready to meet Charles Sumner’s dad and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s dad, sail on the USS Constitution, and Alexander Hamilton himself will even put in a brief appearance.  Plus, we’ll learn why fighting a duel in Massachusetts could get you buried at a crossroads with a stake driven through your heart. 


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Literal Nazis (episode 215)

They stockpiled guns and ammunition.  They built homemade bombs.  They had a hit list of a dozen members of Congress who were targeted for assassination.  They believed themselves to be patriots, with soldiers and police officers among their ranks.  They rallied under the motto of America First, but they planned to overthrow our Constitutional government and install a fascist dictatorship.  Believe it or not, I’m not talking about the insurrection on January 6, 2021, but instead a plot that the FBI uncovered in January 1940.  The subsequent investigation threw a spotlight on a group called the Christian Front that made its headquarters at Boston’s Copley Plaza hotel, promoting violent attacks on Jewish Bostonians while accepting covert funding and support from a Nazi spymaster who flew the swastika proudly from his home on Beacon Hill.


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All the Bells and Whistles (episode 214)

The first commercially viable telephone network was created by a Boston inventor and entrepreneur.  Not Alexander Graham Bell, who is credited with inventing the telephone, but Edwin Thomas Holmes.  Starting in the 1850s, his father Edwin Holmes created the first burglar alarm company here in Boston, then Edwin Thomas Holmes adapted the alarm company’s network of telegraph wires in the 1870s to work with the telephone switchboard he invented.  Working with Alexander Graham Bell, the Holmes company turned his invention into a business and helped him build the Bell Telephone Company.


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The Lighthouse Tragedy (episode 213)

In November 1718, a tragedy on Boston Harbor cut short the lives of six people, including the first keeper of Boston Light and four members of his household.  To find out what happened that morning, we’re going to look at what Boston Harbor was like before the construction of Boston Light, why Boston Harbor needed a lighthouse, how it got built, and who was chosen as the first keeper.  We’ll also look at the founding father who was moved to poetry by the tragedy, as well as the centuries long search for Ben Franklin’s lost verses and a 20th century hoax that got repeated as truth.  Then we’ll close out the show with a quick look at the present and future of Boston Light on Little Brewster Island.

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The Original War on Christmas (episode 212)

The Puritan dissenters who founded the town of Boston are remembered as a deeply religious society, so you might think that Christmas in Puritan Boston would be a big deal.  You’d be wrong though.  Celebrating Christmas was against the law for decades, and it was against cultural norms for a century or more.  What were the Puritans’ theological misgivings about Christmas?  What were the practices of misrule, mummery, and wassailing with which Christmas was celebrated in the 17th century?  And why did the Puritans literally erase Christmas from their calendars?   


Continue reading The Original War on Christmas (episode 212)