Cotton Mather and the Women He Loved, with Helen Gelinas (episode 296)

I’m pleased to share a recent talk called “Cotton Mather and the Women He Loved” that was part of the Congregational Library and Archive’s Valentines Day celebration. Helen Gelinas spoke about Cotton Mather and the women he was closest to: his three wives, his daughters, and his sisters, as well as his lifelong mission to understand the biblical Eve, the prototype for all women in his universe.  Helen examined who he was behind closed doors, as a husband and father, and she challenged us to reconsider our assumptions that Cotton Mather would have been a tyrant over his wife and a strong disciplinarian who ruled his children with a rod. She also shared the surprising insight that between wives, Cotton Mather was one of Boston’s most eligible widowers, who was pursued aggressively by suitors.


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The Mather Borealis (episode 289)

Was Cotton Mather a victim of 18th century cancel culture? In December 1719, Bostonians were astounded at the spectacle of the northern lights dancing in the sky, a sight that nobody alive could remember seeing before. One of the Bostonians who watched in astonishment was Cotton Mather. Confronted with this unprecedented natural phenomenon, Mather was torn. His instinct was to see signs and portents in the aurora borealis, but the world around him was changing, and his fellow natural philosophers were more likely to see the clockwork rules of Newtonian physics than the hand of God or the devil moving the universe around them. Mather’s report focuses on the secular experience of the phenomenon, but had he really changed his tune, or was he following the new political correctness of the modern era?


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The Original War on Christmas (episode 212)

The Puritan dissenters who founded the town of Boston are remembered as a deeply religious society, so you might think that Christmas in Puritan Boston would be a big deal.  You’d be wrong though.  Celebrating Christmas was against the law for decades, and it was against cultural norms for a century or more.  What were the Puritans’ theological misgivings about Christmas?  What were the practices of misrule, mummery, and wassailing with which Christmas was celebrated in the 17th century?  And why did the Puritans literally erase Christmas from their calendars?   


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Pamphlets, Statues, and the Selling of Joseph (episode 191)

In June 1700, a brief pamphlet titled The Selling of Joseph was published in Boston.  It’s considered the first abolitionist tract to be published in what’s now the United States.  Authored by Salem witch trial judge Samuel Sewall, the three page pamphlet uses biblical references to argue that enslaving another person could never be considered moral.  Listen to find out what motivated Sewall to write the tract, how his peers in Boston reacted to it, and what its effect was on the wider world.  In light of recent events, we’ll also consider the current debate around statues and their removal.  


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Unequal Justice in Boston (episode 182)

This week we’re revisiting two classic episodes to highlight injustice in how the death penalty has been applied in our city’s history.  First, we’re going to visit early Boston, in a time when execution by hanging was a shockingly common sentence for everything from murder and piracy to witchcraft and Quakerdom.  During this period, hanging was the usual, and execution by fire was decidedly unusual.  This punishment was reserved only for members of one race and one sex, and in Boston’s history, only two enslaved African American women were burned at the stake.  After that, we’ll fast forward to the mid-19th century, when it seemed like the death penalty would soon be abolished.  After 13 years without an execution in Boston, a black sailor was convicted of first degree murder.  Despite the fact that white men convicted in similar circumstances were sentenced to life in prison, he was condemned to death.  And despite tens of thousands of signatures on petitions for clemency, he was hanged at Leverett Street Jail in May of 1849.


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The 1689 Uprising in Boston, revisited (episode 165)

Early one April morning, the people of Boston rose up in revolt against the royal government of Massachusetts.  Militia marched in the streets, while an alarm brought more armed men from towns all over the area. Soon, the rebels controlled the mainland, while the royal navy still commanded the harbor.  You might think I mean the “shot heard ‘round the world” that started the American Revolution in Lexington. Instead, we’re talking about the 1689 Boston revolt, when the people rose up and overthrew their royal governor, 86 years and one day before the battles at Lexington and Concord.  


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Women and Witchcraft (episode 152)

Between 1648 and 1688, four women were executed for witchcraft in Boston and Dorchester. Witchcraft can be loosely defined as the act of invoking evil spirits or consulting, covenanting with, entertaining, employing, feeding, or rewarding any evil spirit. In practice, it often meant the failure to conform. This week, we’re discussing the trials and executions of Margaret Jones, Alice Lake, Ann Hibbins, and Ann Glover, who fell victim to superstition and Puritan morality.


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No other answer but from the mouth of his cannon (episode 146)

Boston and Quebec City share a deeply intertwined history that goes back to the earliest days of English settlement in North America.  Puritan Boston could hardly stand the idea that their closest European neighbor was a Catholic colony, and they made many attempts to drive the hated French from the continent.  To defeat the French, the New Englanders would have to take fortresses at Louisbourg, Quebec, and Montreal. We recently talked about the 1745 siege of Louisbourg, but this week we’re going even further back in time.  In 1690, Sir William Phips, the frontier shepherd who found a sunken treasure and became a knight, led a large fleet of ships and over 2000 soldiers out of Boston. Their goal was to reduce the defenses of Quebec and force the French colonists to submit to the British crown, but the result was a total disaster.


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Treasure of the Caribbean: the Legend of Governor’s Gold (episode 123)

Sir William Phips was the first royal governor of Massachusetts under the charter of William and Mary.  As governor, he would implement the notorious Court of Oyer and Terminer that led to the executions of 20 innocent people during the Salem witch hysteria.  But long before he was a royal governor, he was a poor shepherd boy in rural Maine, who dreamed of Spanish gold.  Eventually, he made that dream a reality, leading one of the most successful treasure hunts in history and amassing one of the continent’s greatest fortunes.


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Smallpox Remastered (episode 114)

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, and the final outbreak in the 20th century.  We first covered this topic way back in Episode 2, but these days we’re better at researching, writing, and recording, so this episode should be a step up.


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