In honor of Halloween, I’m going to be sharing eight of my favorite Boston ghost stories this week. From haunted houses and inexplicable premonitions recorded by Cotton and Increase Mather in the years leading up to the Salem Witch hysteria, to Nathaniel Hawthorne encountering his friend in the reading room at the Athenaeum for weeks … Continue reading Ghost Stories (episode 208)
You may think taking the T is painful today, but back in the days of horsedrawn streetcars, public transportation was slow, inefficient, and frequently snarled in downtown traffic. In the 1880s, proposals for elevated railways and subways competed for attention as Boston’s rapid transit solution. Then, an ambitious inventor stormed the scene with a groundbreaking … Continue reading A Genuine, Bonafide, Non-Electrified Monorail! (episode 133)
Boston has always been a city that valued education, and few people did as much to improve our educational system as Horace Mann. He started from modest means, living out the one-liner in Good Will Hunting about getting a $150,000 education for $1.50 in late fees at the library. Mann served as a tutor and … Continue reading Horace Mann, Education Innovator (episode 116)
Although Cotton Mather is best known for his role in the Salem Witch Trials, he also pioneered smallpox inoculation in North America, using a traditional African method he learned from a man named Onesimus who Mather enslaved. This week, you’ll hear about Boston’s history with smallpox, including multiple epidemics, the controversy surrounding Mather’s inoculation movement, … Continue reading Smallpox Remastered (episode 114)
For many people, summertime in Boston means canoeing, kayaking, paddle boarding, fishing, and even swimming in the rivers that run through and around our city. To celebrate the season this week we’re coming three classic episodes about industry, adventure, and romance on the water. We’ll hear about the nearly 400 year history of corn, cotton, … Continue reading Love that Dirty Water (episode 90)
We’re celebrating our first “podcastversary” with a look back at our favorite episodes so far, some reflections on podcast production, and our plans for switching things up in the year ahead. Stay tuned for the end, where we ask our listeners an important question about the future of the show.
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. … Continue reading Episode 11: The Ursuline Convent Riots (Inauguration Special, part 1)
