The Battles for Boston Light at 250 (episode 332)

In July 1775, the siege of Boston was approaching its peak, with the New England militias that had been surrounding Boston itself since April coalescing into the brand new Continental Army and the British dug in within the city to protect the vital harbor.  250 years ago this week, Continental officers planned a daring raid on Boston Harbor, essentially taking them deep into hostile territory, since the mighty Royal Navy ruled the waters.  The objective of this raid, or rather raids, because there were two of them, was Boston Light.  Marking the entrance to Boston Harbor since 1716, this humble lighthouse became an important strategic target, during a phase of the war where Britain’s presence in Boston was only possible because of a boatlift connecting their supply lines from Long Wharf to Newcastle and Plymouth in old England.  We’ll also see how the tide of battle could turn on the back of the simple New England whaleboat, which proved itself to be the 18th century equivalent of a stealth fighter in these engagements.  (Parts of this episode originally aired in 2021 as episode 227.)


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Boston’s Newsboy Strike (episode 331)

A while back, my niece Sophie convinced me to watch the Disney live action musical Newsies. The 1992 film features an 18 year old Christian Bale as a homeless New York City newsboy who organizes an unauthorized strike against the biggest newspapers in the city.  The story is peppered through with real names, like Joseph Pulitzer and Teddy Roosevelt, so I was pretty sure it was at least loosely based on a real story, and it made me wonder if Boston’s newsboys had ever gone on an equally adorable strike.  I uncovered the story of a real-life newsboy strike in Boston in 1894, but it didn’t have that much in common with the movie.  In the course of researching the 1894 strike, I learned a lot about newsboys as an emblem of child labor in Boston during the Progressive Era, at a time when reformers thought it better to provide protections that would legitimize child labor rather than eliminating it.


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George Washington Takes Command at Cambridge, featuring the American Revolution Podcast (episode 330)

This week we celebrate another important anniversary in the lead up to America’s 250th birthday.  On July 3, 1775, George Washington assumed command of the newly created Continental Army at their headquarters in Cambridge, and Mike Troy of the American Revolution podcast is going to tell us how it happened.  Mike was our guest last week, but this week he’s allowing me to play clips from two of his classic shows.  I’m going to play part of episode 64 of the American Revolution Podcast, which was titled “The Second Continental Congress Begins,” and all of episode 67, “Washington Takes Command.”  Both these episodes originally aired on the American Revolution Podcast in the fall of 2018, and they will allow us to understand why the Continental Army was created, how George Washington was chosen as our first Commander in Chief, and the challenges Washington faced upon taking command in Cambridge 250 years ago this week.


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The Battle of Bunker Hill at 250, with Mike Troy of the American Revolution Podcast (episode 329)

June 17th, 2025 will mark the 250th anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill, which was the largest Revolutionary War battle to take place in the Boston area and the bloodiest battle of the war (at least on the British side).  Following the outbreak of war in April, the siege of Boston soon became a stalemate, but until Bunker Hill, British officers expected the American provincial army to evaporate the first time they came face to face with the fearsome power of the King’s army.  Fought over a year before America declared independence, Bunker Hill proved this assumption wrong, with the redcoats suffering devastating casualties, even though they defeated the Americans in a pyrrhic victory. In just a few minutes, I’m going to be joined by Mike Troy, host of the American Revolution Podcast.  Together, we’re going to uncover where the battle was fought and how you can find traces of the battlefield in today’s Charlestown.  We’ll look at the officers and men on both sides of the battle, and what the experience of battle was like for the untested American militia soldiers, as well as the lessons that both sides learned from the carnage of June 17, 1775.


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John Winthrop and the First Sinful Fork in America (episode 328)

Instead of the 250th anniversary of an event from the American Revolution in Boston, we’re rewinding the clock 392 years to the spring of 1633, when the first Governor of the Massachusetts Bay colony was given the first fork in America.  We’re going to explore why forks were unknown in Boston at that time, and indeed why they were unfamiliar in England until just a few years before.  We’ll talk about why it took Boston over 100 years to fully embrace the idea of eating food with a fork, including changes to 17th century table manners and the belief that the fork was an inherently sinful utensil.


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Boston’s Forage War (episode 327)

Over the past few episodes, we’ve seen how Massachusetts troops drove the British back from Concord and Lexington to Boston, then created elaborate siege lines that kept the redcoats bottled up in the city, while the Americans controlled the surrounding countryside. 250 years ago this week, the focus of the war shifted from land to sea, with the British leveraging the immense tactical advantage that their navy gave them in projecting power on the ocean and along the coast. To try to offset the hardship of the American siege, the British used their naval power to find food in the Boston Harbor Islands, first on Grape Island, near today’s Weymouth and Hingham, then at Noddles and Hog Islands, which form most of today’s East Boston. At Grape Island, the Americans put up a spirited but largely ineffective defense, but the skirmish we remember as the battle of Chelsea Creek became an important turning point for the Americans. This was the first operation where soldiers from different colonies worked together in a coordinated effort; the first time the rebellious New Englanders used artillery in battle; and the first time Americans engaged and actually captured a British warship.


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A Hero for Fort Ticonderoga (episode 326)

Every Bostonian knows Fort Ticonderoga as the source of the cannons that Henry Knox brought to Boston, secretly hauled to the top of Dorchester Heights in the middle of the night, and used to drive the redcoats out of Boston forever.  We’ll cover that story later in our 250th anniversary season, but this week I want to think about the other end of the chain.  Before Henry Knox could bring his noble train of artillery to Boston, somebody had to take those cannons, and the fort they belonged to, from the redcoats.  We usually give credit for the daring capture of Fort Ticonderoga to Ethan Allen, whose homestead you can visit outside Burlington, Vermont these days.  The capture is actually at least as much a Boston story as it is a Vermont story, as the orders to capture the fort were issued by our local patriots.  We forget about this part of the story because the officer who was chosen to lead the expedition to Fort Ti was one of the greatest heroes of the revolution, right up until the point when he became one of history’s greatest traitors.  That’s right, Benedict Arnold.


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Boston Under Siege (episode 325)

From the moment the April 19, 1775 battle of Lexington and Concord ended until the British gave up and evacuated the city in March 1776, Boston was the epicenter of the American War for Independence.  After eleven months of under siege, Boston was effectively independent after the British evacuation, never being under serious threat of re-invasion after March 17, 1776.  Unfortunately, the Siege of Boston started and ended before independence was declared in Philadelphia, so it’s usually forgotten in our retelling of our national origin story.  For this week’s show, let’s linger on the siege to see how it came together 250 years ago this week, how colonial Bostonians decided whether they should stay in their homes or flee to the countryside, and where the battle lines were drawn upon the map of modern Boston.  Over the course of the coming year, we’ll return to the siege of Boston several times to talk about battles and skirmishes, heroes and traitors, and generals and everyday Bostonians, but for now I want to set the stage with an episode about the early days of the siege in April and May of 1775.


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Paul Revere’s Ride at 250 (episode 324)

Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.

This week marks the 250th anniversary of our American Revolution, with the first battles taking place in Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775.  The night before, Paul Revere rode from Boston to Lexington to warn John Hancock and Samuel Adams that the British regulars were coming out that night.  Most Americans have a mental image of a lone rider in the night carrying the fate of the nation and the future of independence with him.  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “The Landlord’s Tale, or Paul Revere’s Ride” is largely responsible for that image, but is it accurate?  This week, we retell the story of Paul Revere’s ride by looking at Longfellow’s poem alongside two versions of the night’s events that were told by Paul Revere in his own words.  


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The Ship Boston from Boston and the Sailor from the Other Boston (episode 323)

222 years ago, on March 22, 1803, a teenaged sailor named John R Jewitt from Boston, Lincolnshire was onboard the ship Boston from Boston, Massachusetts when it was captured in Nootka Sound on the west coast of today’s Vancouver Island in Canada by a powerful king of the Nuu-Chah-Nulth people. For almost three years, Jewitt and one other survivor from the Boston were enslaved by the king Maquinna, during which time Jewitt kept a journal that has become an important ethnographic study of indigenous life on the northwest coast of North America. Besides life among the Nuu-Chah-Nulth, this incident helps reveal the importance of Boston’s maritime economy in the years between independence and the war of 1812. It also joins our episodes on the ship Columbia and the Park Street missionaries to Hawaii in illustrating how Boston merchants and whalers had an outsized influence on the culture of the west coast, even before America laid claim to the region. How did John Jewitt ingratiate himself to his captors well enough to survive his ordeal, and how did he manage to concoct an escape long after it seemed that all hope was lost? Listen now!


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