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.
Tag: media
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)
Episode 26: Isaiah Thomas and the American Oracle of Liberty
This week, we’re going to talk about Isaiah Thomas. Not the NBA star, but the colonial printer and founder of the Massachusetts Spy, whose office became known by the British as the Sedition Foundry. He snuck his presses out of Boston on the eve of war, helped Paul Revere spread the news of the British march, and shared first-hand accounts of the battles at Concord and Lexington. Later, he would spread his business empire across multiple states, and become a historian, founding the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts. Listen to his story!
Continue reading Episode 26: Isaiah Thomas and the American Oracle of Liberty