Allan Rohan Crite was a world renowned artist who grew up in Boston’s South End in the early part of the 20th century. After enrolling in the Children’s Art Center and graduating from English High, he attended the MFA School and graduated in 1936. His work was first shown at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1936 and his first solo show at the Boston Athaneaum was in 1948. He went on to work at the Charlestown Navy Yard for over thirty years, while his paintings drew local and then national and international attention. During this time, he attended Harvard Extension School, where he earned an ALB degree in 1968. Looking at all of these experiences together, Allan Rohan Crite truly was a son of Boston, his work opening a window on the experience of Black Bostonians in the 30s, 40s, and beyond. If you are a lover of Boston history, you won’t want to miss the special exhibition of his work on view at the Boston Athenaeum through January 24 and at the Isabella Stuart Gardener Museum through January 19th. In this episode, Michelle Leblanc from the Athenaeum joins us to discuss the two wonderful exhibitions Crite’s work that are on display in Boston right now and what we can learn about Boston history from them.
Tag: 20th Century
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)
Martin Luther King’s Boston, with Dr. Imari Paris Jeffries (episode 320)
This week, Dr. Imari Paris Jeffries joins us to talk about the years when Martin Luther King, Jr lived in Boston. As you’ll hear him say in just a few minutes, Dr. King is a figure that most of us only imagine as a grainy newsreel image or a voice crackling on an old recording, so it can be hard to imagine Dr. King as flesh and blood. With Dr. Paris Jeffries’ help, we’re going to imagine the Boston that Reverend King experienced: where he studied, where he fell in love with Coretta Scott, and where he would return over a decade later, when he had already become a legend in his own time.
Continue reading Martin Luther King’s Boston, with Dr. Imari Paris Jeffries (episode 320)
The Silenced Muse: Emily Hale, T.S. Eliot, and the Role of a Lifetime, with Sara Fitzgerald (episode 319)
In this episode, Sara Fitzgerald joins us to discuss her new book The Silenced Muse: Emily Hale, T.S. Eliot, and the Role of a Lifetime. It is the first book-length biography of Emily Hale, the longtime love and secret creative muse of poet T.S. Eliot, who wrote Emily Hale over 1100 letters over the decades of their complicated relationship. However, their relationship was mostly forgotten by history after their letters were locked away for 50 years after their deaths, to protect the innocent. By the time the archive was opened in January 2020, few scholars understood the depth of their relationship. This book reestablishes Hale, not only as a major influence on T.S. Eliot’s body of work, but also as her own woman. From Hale’s upbringing in Chestnut Hill to their first flirtation in a Harvard Square parlor, Fitzgerald traces the intertwining lives of Hale and Eliot over a half a century that revolves around the intellectual center of gravity that is Boston.
Beastly Boston (episode 318)
Lions and tigers and bears, oh my! This week, we’re talking about Boston’s first encounters with exotic animals. I will be talking about the very first lion to make an appearance in Boston, but instead of tigers and bears, we’ll take a look at Boston’s experiences with elephants and alligators. Our story will span almost 200 years, with the first lion being imported in the early 1700s, the first elephant in the late 1700s, and the first alligators that most Bostonians got acquainted with were installed in the Public Garden in 1901. Can you imagine proper late-Victorian Bostonians crowding around a pool of alligators to watch them tear live animals limb from limb? I couldn’t either before digging into this week’s episode.
Boston Pre- and Post-Roe (episode 317)
Thirty years ago this week, Brookline became the site of the most deadly anti-abortion violence in American history, at least up to that point. Sadly, right wing extremists and religious terrorists have since eclipsed the bloodshed on Beacon Street on December 30, 1994. On that day, two women’s health clinics were targeted by a radical with a gun because, along with pap smears, birth control, and STD screenings, they provided abortion care. His shooting spree left two people dead, five wounded, and fit into a national pattern of violence against abortion providers. This week, we’ll review that heartbreaking case, then we’ll revisit a classic episode that warns us what could happen to pregnant women in Boston before Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in America through the tragic example of Jennie Clarke.
Boston Airs America’s First Television Commercial (episode 315)
94 years ago this week, Boston’s second television station aired the first commercial in American history, and they did it almost two decades before Boston’s first television station went on the air. In this episode, we use this blunder and a confusing technological landscape to examine Boston’s pivotal role in the early development of American television. This will be a story of innovation, some of the earliest experimental television broadcasters in the country, and the parallel development of mechanical and electronic television technologies.
Continue reading Boston Airs America’s First Television Commercial (episode 315)
Remembering Rita (episode 314)
The annual Transgender Day of Remembrance calls attention to an epidemic of violence against trans people, and Black trans women in particular, but did you know that this solemn event was inspired by a brutal 1998 Allston murder? In this episode, we hear from the friends of Rita Hester about a vibrant life that was inspired by music and cut short by violence. We’ll see how her murder fit a pattern of crimes in the Boston area in the late 90s and how Rita’s family and friends channeled their grief into activism. You’ll also have to suffer through some meandering personal anecdotes, because this is one of the only episodes of the show to recount an event in Boston history that took place since I lived here.
The Boston Cowboy Strike (episode 313)
In this episode, we explore the 1936 Boston cowboy strike, a one-day wildcat strike that became the founding moment for a labor union that still exists today. Staged by an organization that became known as the Cowboy Turtle Association at the old Boston Garden, this was the first rodeo strike in the world. While I call it a cowboy strike, cowgirls were an important feature of this particular rodeo, and the union’s longterm success is due in no small part to the wife of a champion cowboy. Why was a cowboy union formed in Boston, of all places? And how did it get the name Cowboy Turtle Association? Listen now!
Hat tip to listener Sam S for suggesting this week’s topic!
The Importance of Being Furnished, with Tripp Evans and Erica Lome (episode 308)
This week, Erica Lome and Tripp Evans join the show to discuss a new exhibit at the Eustis Estate called “The Importance of Being Furnished.” In the wake of Oscar Wilde’s 1882 lecture tour focusing on The House Beautiful, outlandishly decorated bachelor households became an aspirational style that helped define American homes from the Gilded Age to the Jazz Era. The new Aesthetic Movement brought beauty and artistic sensibility to American homes, replacing conservative styles that reinforced traditional morality. “The Importance of Being Furnished” introduces four decorators who helped revolutionize interior design during this period: Charles Gibson, Ogden Codman, Charles Pendleton, and Henry Sleeper, as well as their homes in Boston’s Back Bay, Gloucester, Lincoln, and Providence. In their own time, all four men were known as bachelor aesthetes, born into privileged families but hiding their queerness to greater or lesser degrees in an era when homosexuality was punishable by jail time in Boston. In this interview, exhibit curators Tripp Evans and Erica Lome will tell us how these men took inspiration from their personal lives in decorating their own homes, and how they leveraged those lavish homes into careers in decorating for everyone from robber barons to Hollywood stars.
Continue reading The Importance of Being Furnished, with Tripp Evans and Erica Lome (episode 308)