This week we’re discussing the riots and destruction of Charlestown’s Ursuline convent, which we first covered back in January 2017. This episode touches on themes of xenophobia, anti-immigrant prejudice, and religious intolerance – lessons we can all learn from today. On a hot summer’s night in 1834, rumors swirled around a Catholic girls’ school in Charlestown. Catholicism was a frightening, unfamiliar religion, and Catholic immigrants were viewed with great suspicion. People said that the nuns were being held in slavery, or that Protestant children were being tortured and forcibly converted. A crowd gathered, and violence flared. When the sun rose the next morning, the Ursuline Convent lay in smoking ruins. Thirteen men were tried, but none served time. What deep seated biases led Yankee Boston down this dark road? Listen to this week’s episode to find out!
The Ursuline Convent Riot
Views inside the New Orleans http://healthsavy.com/product/xanax/ Ursuline Convent
An August 31, 1775 letter detailing how Patriots took Ploughed Hill.- 1777 map showing (roughly) the position of Ploughed Hill
- The site of the Ursuline Convent in 1852 and today.
1852 
2017 - The City Council’s ineffectual report on the riot
- Ringleader John Buzzell’s trial
- The 1845 romance novel that treated all the Protestant fears and prejudices about Catholicism as real.
- “Great Meeting at Faneuil Hall,” Boston Evening Transcript, 12 August, 1834.
- “Burning of the Charlestown Convent,” Boston Evening Transcript, 12 August, 1834
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Six Months in a Convent, Or, The Narrative of Rebecca Theresa Reed
Boston Book Club
Our pick for the Boston Book Club this week is The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America’s First Subway by Doug Most.
In the late nineteenth century, as cities like Boston and New York grew more congested, the streets became clogged with plodding, horse-drawn carts. When the great blizzard of 1888 crippled the entire northeast, a solution had to be found. Two brothers from one of the nation’s great families-Henry Melville Whitney of Boston and William Collins Whitney of New York-pursued the dream of his city digging America’s first subway, and the great race was on. The competition between Boston and New York played out in an era not unlike our own, one of economic upheaval, life-changing innovations, class warfare, bitter political tensions, and the question of America’s place in the world.
The Race Underground is peopled with the famous, like Boss Tweed, Grover Cleveland and Thomas Edison, and the not-so-famous, from brilliant engineers to the countless “sandhogs” who shoveled, hoisted and blasted their way into the earth’s crust, sometimes losing their lives in the construction of the tunnels. Doug Most chronicles the science of the subway, looks at the centuries of fears people overcame about traveling underground and tells a story as exciting as any ever ripped from the pages of U.S. history. The Race Underground is a great American saga of two rival American cities, their rich, powerful and sometimes corrupt interests, and an invention that changed the lives of millions.
Read Stephen Puleo’s review for The Boston Globe.
Upcoming Event
Our featured event this week is Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence, hosted by the Royall House and Slave Quarters on Wednesday, March 20, 2019 at 7:30 p.m.
From its origins in the 1750’s, the white-led American abolitionist movement adhered to principles of “moral suasion” and nonviolent resistance. But a century later, any rights black Americans held as enslaved or free people had been voided. As conditions deteriorated for African Americans, black abolitionist leaders embraced violence as the only means of shocking Northerners out of their apathy and instigating an antislavery war.
In her forthcoming book, Wellesley College historian Kellie Carter Jackson provides the first historical analysis exclusively focused on the tactical use of violence among antebellum black activists. Force and Freedom takes readers beyond the honorable politics of moral suasion and the romanticism of the Underground Railroad and into an exploration of the agonizing decisions, strategies, and actions of the black abolitionists who, though lacking an official political voice, were nevertheless responsible for instigating monumental social and political change.
Kellie Carter Jackson is a historian and an Assistant Professor at Wellesley College in the Department of Africana Studies. She earned her B.A. from Howard University, and her PhD from Columbia University.
Copies of Force and Freedom will be available for purchase and signing at the event.