December 2025 Programming Notes

For the next few months, from December 2025 to about July of 2026, HUB History listeners are going to hear a lot less of host Jake.  I will be stepping away temporarily to produce a six-episode podcast series for Queer History Boston.  You may not recognize that name, because the organization was known as The History Project until a recent rebranding.  Queer History Boston is a community archive that has been documenting, preserving, and sharing the LGBTQ+ histories of Boston and New England for over 45 years.  

A few months ago, we teamed up to apply for a grant from Mass Humanities and the Mass Cultural Council called “Expand Massachusetts Stories – Promises of the Revolution.”  The grant program is meant to highlight stories of the American Revolution that usually go untold and highlight how marginalized groups have seized on the core promises made by the Declaration of Independence: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the fundamental equality of all people, your basic promise of America.  Our yet-to-be-named show will start with stories of queer and gender nonconforming veterans of the Revolutionary War itself, then follow subsequent generations of queer revolutionaries, right up to the first Pride parade in 1970.  I’m incredibly excited for the opportunity, but it means I’m not going to have as much time for HUB History for a while.

Luckily, you are going to be in incredibly capable hands while I am gone.  Cohost emerita Nikki is going to rejoin the show for a while.  If you listened to our show many years ago, back when HUB History was weekly, you’ll remember that Nikki used to anchor the podcast with me every week.  Since leaving the show a few years ago, she has gone on to an enviable career at Old North Illuminated, where she has developed an broad network of Boston history people.  While I’m away, Nikki is going to interview authors, curators, rangers, and all kinds of interesting guests.  The first of these conversations is coming up on December 14, when Nikki will interview Ken Turino about the history of Christmas in Boston and how historic sites in Boston and around the country can engage with Christmas in historically appropriate ways. 

Jake will be back to host a few episodes when time allows, and I’ll share updates about how my work with Queer History Boston is going when I do.  If you have any questions or comments about these next few months, don’t hesitate to contact us!

How the Nascent Navy’s Nancy Armed the Army (episode 341)

By late November 1775, George Washington and the Continental Army encircling Boston faced a crisis: their soldiers were facing a frigid New England winter, their enlistments were expiring, and they were critically short of guns and gunpowder and essential supplies.  General Washington was desperate to strike the British before his army melted away, even contemplating the use of spears as a last resort against the world’s most powerful military. The Continentals’ luck began to change when Washington commissioned a small squadron of six lightly armed schooners, the first American Navy, and ordered them to patrol New England waters. One of these schooners, the Lee, was commanded by a Captain John Manley of Marblehead. Operating under Washington’s directive to harass enemy shipping, Captain Manley cleverly tricked and captured the British ordnance brigantine Nancy near Boston Harbor on November 29, 1775. This single ship that had strayed from the safety of a larger convoy proved to be an “immense acquisition” for the patriots, yielding a treasure trove of military stores: cannons, thousands of muskets, and perhaps most importantly, a cache of ammunition and gunpowder that, paired with Henry Knox’s noble train of artillery, would provide the Continentals with enough firepower to finally drive the British out of Boston.


Continue reading How the Nascent Navy’s Nancy Armed the Army (episode 341)

Inventing the Boston Game: Football, Soccer, and the Origins of a National Myth, with Kevin Tallec Marston and Mike Cronin (episode 340)

This will be our 2025 Thanksgiving episode, and nothing says Thanksgiving quite like football…  At least for most people, I guess. Somehow, the gene for caring about football missed me. The last football game I saw was a Super Bowl, and cohost emerita Nikki remembered that Beyonce sang Formation that year, which means it must have been 2016.  All that to say that if the new book Inventing the Boston Game: Football, Soccer, and the Origins of a National Myth can get me interested in the early history of football, it can do it for anyone.  Inventing the Boston Game follows the story of a group of upper-class Boston private school boys who called themselves the Oneida foot ball club.  During the height of the Civil War in 1862, they started playing a ball game on Boston Common.  Authors Mike Cronin and Kevin Tallec Marston join us this week to discuss how generations have argued about whether their Boston Game was some of the first soccer in the US or the first organized American football team.  Especially after a group of teammates placed a stone monument on Boston Common 100 years ago this week, it was clear that they were deliberately inserting themselves into American sports history, but a century later it is hard to tell how much of their shared mythology was true.


Continue reading Inventing the Boston Game: Football, Soccer, and the Origins of a National Myth, with Kevin Tallec Marston and Mike Cronin (episode 340)

Revolutionary Self Defense (episode 339)

In this episode, we’ll revisit two murder trials that were held in revolutionary Boston.  The first case was against four ordinary sailors accused of murdering an officer of the Royal Navy on a ship in Massachusetts coastal waters, and the other was against nine British prisoners of war who were accused of murdering a guard aboard a prison ship in Boston Harbor.  The sailors were accused in 1769, when Boston was under military occupation and the tensions that would result in the Boston Massacre were coming to a head.  The redcoats stood trial over a decade later, in the midst of a bloody war that had touched the lives of all Bostonians by 1780.  In both cases, attorneys and judges worried whether a jury could deliver justice in a polarized city.  Both cases were argued by signers of the Declaration of Independence, with John Adams defending the American sailors in 1780 and Robert Treat Paine prosecuting the redcoats in 1780.  In both cases, the defendants argued that they had acted in self defense, and amazingly, both cases ended in acquittal.


Continue reading Revolutionary Self Defense (episode 339)

Boston’s Country Fair (episode 338)

In October 1855, exactly 170 years ago this week, Boston hosted the third annual exhibition of the United States Agricultural Society, a grand five-day event that was lauded in the press as “a greater show of cattle and horses than has ever been given previously in the world.” Set on a newly created, fifty-acre fairground in the South End, the exhibition showcased Boston’s civic pride and economic power at a time when agriculture was still a primary driver of the American economy. While originally envisioned to showcase a range of crops, fruits, and agricultural implements, the Boston fair ultimately focused almost entirely on livestock and featured a significant amount of horse and harness racing, which was controversial in a city with a reputation for uptight conservatism. The event was promoted as a wholesome, family-friendly affair, with extensive amenities for women and children, deliberately distancing itself from the rough-and-tumble reputation of traditional cattle markets. The exhibition successfully attracted throngs of visitors, offered over $10,000 in cash prizes, and drew national attention, ultimately contributing to the popularity of harness racing in New England and strengthening the case for federal support of scientific agriculture.


Continue reading Boston’s Country Fair (episode 338)

America’s First Traitor (episode 337)

250 years ago today, a letter from George Washington revealed a devastating secret: there was a British spy at the highest level of patriot leadership.  The traitor was none other than Dr. Benjamin Church, a man who seemed to embody the American cause.  He was a Harvard-educated physician who had been appointed as our first surgeon general, he was a close confidant of leaders like Samuel Adams and Joseph Warren, and he was officially in charge of organizing the war effort as head of the Massachusetts Committee of Safety.  Church had risked his life for liberty and was trusted with the revolution’s deepest political and military secrets, but a coded letter, a secret mistress, and a suspicious baker would unravel a web of deceit that would make Benedict Arnold blush.


Continue reading America’s First Traitor (episode 337)

The Hard Work of Hope, with Michael Ansara (episode 336)

This week’s guest is Michael Ansara, author of a new volume of memoir called The Hard Work of Hope.  It is a personal story, but it’s also a history of Boston in the 1960s, and especially of anti-war activism at Harvard and organizing among the New Left political movement during the Vietnam era.  Michael went from a middle class childhood in Brookline to the playground of the elites at Harvard, just at the historical moment when the civil rights movement entered mainstream consciousness and as the US government dramatically escalated the war in Vietnam.  Michael remembers the chaos and fear of those times, but also the patriotism and the optimism of youth that drove so many of his contemporaries, and the relentless organizing it took to shape that youthful optimism into a political movement that had the potential to change the world, though that potential may not have been fully realized.  In our conversation, he looks back on hard-won lessons learned and grapples with the question of how today’s organizers might save a democracy teetering on the brink.


Continue reading The Hard Work of Hope, with Michael Ansara (episode 336)

The Riflemen’s Mutiny and the March to Quebec (episode 335)

In this episode, we will learn about two important developments in the siege of Boston 250 years ago this month, in September 1775.  First, we’ll learn about the invasion of Quebec that Benedict Arnold launched out of Boston that month, in hopes of winning over Canadian hearts and minds.  If you have ever wondered why Canada isn’t part of the United States, we can probably chalk that up to Arnold’s ill-fated expedition, as well as the 150 years of conflict between Canadians and New Englanders that had gone before.  We will also learn about the riflemen who made up much of the invasion force.  Recruited from the backwoods of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and what’s now West Virginia, these exotic troops were treated as celebrities when they first arrived at the Continental camp in Cambridge, but the bloom was soon off the rose.  As we’ll hear, some of the riflemen staged the first mutiny in the Continental Army 250 years ago this week, until they were personally subdued by George Washington near Union Square in today’s Somerville.  


Continue reading The Riflemen’s Mutiny and the March to Quebec (episode 335)

Hot Siege Summer (episode 334)

After the Battle of Bunker Hill in June, the siege of Boston reverted to a stalemate through the summer of 1775.  While Benedict Arnold would lead some of the Continentals north from Cambridge into Canada and Henry Knox tried to wrestle Fort Ticonderoga’s cannons south from upstate New York to Cambridge, there was not a lot of action around Boston.  Instead, as we’ll explore in this episode, the focus shifted to preparation, with riflemen from the far western frontier in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Maryland joining the lines, with Continentals building new forts to consolidate their siege lines, and with the redcoats venting their frustrations on Boston’s Liberty Tree.  We’ll also see how the new Continental commander in chief, George Washington, could barely be restrained from ordering a direct, frontal assault on the superior British force in Boston, even though there wasn’t enough ammunition in the Continental camp to go around.  


Continue reading Hot Siege Summer (episode 334)

The Well Known Caesar Marion (was committed to prison) (episode 333)

In this episode, we go in search of a Black Bostonian who was “well known” to his contemporaries, including Boston newspapers, but who was all but forgotten by history.  If not for a one-paragraph news article and work by historians to reconstruct aspects of his life from notarial records, we may not know the name Caesar Marion.  In this somewhat brief episode, we’re going to look at why Mr. Marion was thrown into Boston’s notorious jail 250 years ago this week, and then we’ll compare his treatment inside British-occupied Boston with the experience of Black volunteers in the Continental Army outside Boston, once Virginia enslaver George Washington took command.  


Continue reading The Well Known Caesar Marion (was committed to prison) (episode 333)