Tag: 19th Century

Boston’s Railroad Jubilee (episode 203)

In September 1851, Boston threw an enormous party, a party big enough to span three days.  After 15 years of development, the railroad network centered on Boston stretched out in every direction, linking the port of Boston to the American Midwest and the interior of Canada, with the Cunard line’s steamers giving access to markets in England.  To celebrate the new era of railroading, the city threw a grand Railroad Jubilee and invited President Millard Fillmore, the Governor General of Canada, and dignitaries from all over the country.  Besides commerce and steam locomotives, this episode will highlight a growing split within the Whigs old political party; Boston’s ever-present competition with New York City; and the seemingly unavoidable rush toward a civil war over the question of slavery.

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Boston Transportation Firsts (episode 202)

Co-host emerita Nikki and I are camping this weekend, so instead of a brand new episode, we’re giving you three classic stories about advances in transportation in Boston. First up, we’re going to take a look at a precursor to today’s MBTA.  In the late 19th century, a bold entrepreneur built a full sized, working monorail in East Cambridge, but failed to convince the city to adopt it for public transportation.  Then, inspired by last week’s show about the World Fliers, our second story will be about the first people to take to the skies in Boston.  In the early 19th century, daring aeronauts made a series of increasingly ambitious balloon ascents in Boston.  Finally, we’ll turn the clock back to the 1780s, just as the Revolutionary War was concluding.  At the time, the town of Boston was on a tiny peninsula, almost completely surrounded by water.  The ferry connecting Boston to the mainland struggled to keep up with demand, and Bostonians were looking for a better way… but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.  


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Dr. Rebecca Crumpler, Forgotten No Longer (episode 200)

Dr. Rebecca Davis Lee Crumpler was the first Black woman to earn a medical degree in the US in 1864, and she spent most of her adult life in Charlestown, Beacon Hill, and the Readville section of Hyde Park.  She devoted her career to pediatrics and obstetrics, published the first medical text by an African American author, and made a point of caring for the marginalized, even moving to Virginia to tend to formerly enslaved people at the end of the Civil War.  The nation’s first Black female physician lay in an unmarked grave for 125 years, but there have been important developments in the story of Dr. Crumpler while we’ve been in quarantine this year.


Continue reading Dr. Rebecca Crumpler, Forgotten No Longer (episode 200)

The Clipper Ships of East Boston (episode 199)

Kick back and enjoy our interview with Stephen Ujifusa, author of Barons of the Sea, and Their Race to Build the World’s Fastest Clipper Ship, which originally aired in July 2018.  Stephen takes us back to an era when the fastest, most elegant ships in the world were built in the East Boston shipyard of Donald McKay.  He also describes how they were used to trade for tea in China or gold in California, and how they helped America’s most prominent families amass fortunes through opium smuggling.  


Continue reading The Clipper Ships of East Boston (episode 199)

Boston Goes to Bleeding Kansas (episode 195)

Bleeding Kansas was a deadly guerrilla war between so-called Border Ruffians from Missouri in support of slavery on one side, and earnest abolitionists from New England on the other.  The violence peaked on Kansas prairies in the decade before the US Civil War officially began, fought with guns, newspapers, artillery, and sometimes even broadswords.  A Boston-based company seeded those earnest abolitionists into that prairie and eventually looked the other way as they transformed themselves from farmers to vigilantes and soldiers.


Continue reading Boston Goes to Bleeding Kansas (episode 195)

A People’s Guide to Greater Boston, with Joseph Nevins and Suren Moodliar (episode 192)

A People’s Guide to Greater Boston is a new kind of guidebook to Boston and surrounding towns.  Instead of giving an overview of the Freedom Trail and introducing readers to the hot restaurants and hotels of Boston, this guide uncovers the forgotten stories of radicals and activists hidden in every neighborhood and suburb.  It has sections covering Boston’s urban core, the neighborhoods, adjoining towns, and suburbs from Brockton to Haverhill.  In each section, the authors unearth a wide range of sites, and in some cases former sites, that are tied to Black, indigenous, labor, or other radical historic events and figures.  For listeners who complain that our normal episodes are too political, or our point of view is too liberal… well, sorry in advance.  This guide definitely doesn’t keep politics out of history, and its point of view is well to the left of our usual editorial voice.


Continue reading A People’s Guide to Greater Boston, with Joseph Nevins and Suren Moodliar (episode 192)

Like a Trump of Coming Judgement (episode 190)

This week, we’re revisiting a classic episode about the radical Black abolitionist David Walker.  Walker was a transplant to Boston, moving here after possibly being involved in Denmark Vesey’s planned 1822 slave insurrection in South Carolina.  At a time when very few whites spoke of ending slavery, Frederick Douglass said Walker’s book An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World “startled the land like a trump of coming judgement.”  He demanded an immediate end to slavery, and he endorsed violence against white slave owners to bring about abolition.  After the book helped inspire Nat Turner’s 1830 uprising in Virginia, southern slave states banned his book and offered a reward for anyone who would kill or kidnap him.  With a price on his head, many people believed that David Walker’s mysterious death in a Beacon Hill doorway just a year after his landmark book was published was an assassination.  


Continue reading Like a Trump of Coming Judgement (episode 190)

Whale Watching on Washington Street (episode 185)

In the 1860s, Bostonians could pay 20 cents and watch a captive whale swim in a custom built aquarium on Washington Street in Boston’s Downtown Crossing.  Today, there’s no sea world near Boston, and our New England Aquarium doesn’t hold any whales or dolphins.  Perhaps that’s for the best, as we now realize how intelligent these giants of the sea are.  However, things were different 160 years ago, when an entrepreneurial inventor did the impossible, bringing a beluga whale alive from the arctic ocean to Boston and keeping it alive here for at least 18 months, before being betrayed by the greatest showman, PT Barnum himself.


Continue reading Whale Watching on Washington Street (episode 185)

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.


Continue reading Unequal Justice in Boston (episode 182)

The Deleterious Effects of Marsh Miasmata (episode 177)

Instead of profiling a historic Bostonian or bringing you a dramatic story, let’s read a letter together. This brief letter gives an account of a strange, frightening, and funny occurrence on Boston’s Long Wharf in the summer of 1797. Along with one delightfully funny incident, the letter includes details about Boston’s infrastructure and commercial port at the turn of the 19th century. Don’t worry, we’ll flesh out the letter with context from other sources, as well.


Continue reading The Deleterious Effects of Marsh Miasmata (episode 177)