Hooker Day was a one-time holiday celebrated in Boston in 1903. While it might sound like this is going to be an X-rated podcast, we’re not talking about that kind of hooker. Civil War General Joseph “Fighting Joe” Hooker was briefly the commander of the main Union force called the Army of the Potomac. Forty years after his command, he was immortalized with a massive statue in front of our State House. When the statue was dedicated, the entire city celebrated a holiday that was called Hooker Day in his honor.
Tag: 19th Century
ED Leavitt, Fresh Water, and Steam Power (episode 137)
For centuries before the Quabbin reservoir opened, Boston struggled to provide enough clean, fresh water for its growing population. One of the solutions to this problem was a new reservoir built at Chestnut Hill in the 1880s. The pumping station at this reservoir was home to enormous steam powered pumping engines, and it’s preserved today as the Metropolitan Waterworks Museum. Eric Peterson joins us this week to talk about the history of Boston’s water supply, steam power, and a brilliant engineer who designed the steam pumps that provided Boston’s water.
Continue reading ED Leavitt, Fresh Water, and Steam Power (episode 137)
Boston Marriages in Literature and Life (episode 136)
A new form of relationship arose between 19th century women, which had all the emotional trappings of romantic love, but was long considered to be merely an intense form of friendship. More recently, however, critics have wondered whether Victorian assumptions about the inherent chasteness of womankind allowed couples who would consider themselves lesbians today to hide in plain sight.
These relationships came to be known as “Boston marriages,” both because a number of high profile Bostonians engaged in them, and because Henry James popularized the concept in his novel The Bostonians. As the story of the name indicates, real relationships between women were influenced by contemporary literature by James, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Oliver Wendall Holmes, but these authors also drew inspiration from the apparently romantic relationships they saw between women in their lives.
Continue reading Boston Marriages in Literature and Life (episode 136)
The Underground Railroad on Boston Harbor (episode 135)
In the 19th century, a network of abolitionists and sympathizers in Boston helped enslaved African Americans find their way to freedom in the Northern states or Canada. It’s a topic we’ve talked about before, but this time there’s a twist. We’re going to be examining how Boston’s position as an important port city changed the dynamic of seeking freedom. Jake sat down with National Park Service ranger Shawn Quigley to discuss how the underground railroad ran right through Boston Harbor.
Continue reading The Underground Railroad on Boston Harbor (episode 135)
A Genuine, Bonafide, Non-Electrified Monorail! (episode 133)
You may think taking the T is painful today, but back in the days of horsedrawn streetcars, public transportation was slow, inefficient, and frequently snarled in downtown traffic. In the 1880s, proposals for elevated railways and subways competed for attention as Boston’s rapid transit solution. Then, an ambitious inventor stormed the scene with a groundbreaking proposal for a monorail. He even went as far as building a mile long track in East Cambridge, showing that the monorail worked. If it hadn’t been for bad luck and bad politics, we might all be taking monorails instead of today’s Red and Orange lines, but instead the monorail turned out to be more of a Shelbyville idea.
Continue reading A Genuine, Bonafide, Non-Electrified Monorail! (episode 133)
Harnessing the Power of Boston’s Tides (episode 130)
This week, we interview Earl Taylor, president of the Dorchester Historical Society and one of the founders of the Tide Mill Institute. He tells us how early Bostonians harnessed the power of the tides in Boston Harbor to grind their grain, manufacture products like snuff and spices, and even produce baby carriages. Plus, he shows us the advantages tidal power had over other types of mills, how tide mills shaped the landscape of Boston, and why tide mills went out of fashion.
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The Miracle of Ether (episode 129)
Among the many medical breakthroughs that are attributed to Boston, surgical anesthesia is among the most impactful. It’s hard to overstate the importance in medical history of ether for the treatment of pain, particularly for those undergoing surgical procedures. Many believe that this technique was pioneered at MGH under the famous Ether Dome, but history tells us a different origin story.
Lincoln and Booth and Boston (episode 128)
This episode is being released on April 14, 2019, which means that Abraham Lincoln was shot 154 years ago today. That’s why we’re talking about the links between the Lincoln assassination and the city of Boston. President Lincoln, his assassin John Wilkes Booth, and Boston Corbett, the man who killed Booth, all had transformative experiences in Boston.
BPL Bonus Episode: Grand Peace Jubilee
Join us at the Boston Public Library to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Grand National Peace Jubilee held in Copley Square in 1869. The Peace Jubilee was a week-long musical celebration of the Union victory in the Civil War. It was a concert of unprecedented scale, performed before an audience of up to 50,000 in a purpose-built Coliseum in the Back Bay that was one of the largest buildings in the world. People came from far and wide to take in the spectacle, including President Ulysses S Grant and many other dignitaries. The climax of the show was a piece by Verdi called the Anvil Chorus. Jubilee director Patrick Gilmore conducted 10,000 vocalists, who were backed by 1000 instrumentalists, a battery of cannons, a convocation of church bells, a custom made bass drum eight feet in diameter, the world’s largest pipe organ, and a company of 100 Boston firefighters carrying sledgehammers and pounding anvils in unison.
To help celebrate the 150th anniversary of this musical spectacular, the Associates of the Boston Public Library are throwing a party at the Copley branch of the BPL on March 29. Nikki and I will be giving a brief talk discussing who Patrick Gilmore was, how he conceived of the enormous Coliseum where the Jubilee was held, and what the concert was like. Boston’s poet laureate Porsha Olayiwola will give a reading, and the keynote address will be delivered by Theodore C. Landsmark. The highlight of the evening will be a musical performance by a brass band from the New England Conservatory of Music, featuring some of the same arrangements that were performed in 1869, complete with firemen hammering anvils.
If you’d like to join us at the BPL on Friday, March 29, make sure to pre-register. The event is free, but you have to pre-register to get in. Doors open at 7pm, and the program begins at 7:30. There will be a cash bar.
Our description of the Grand Peace Jubilee originally aired as episode 102.
Weird Neighborhood History (episode 124)
Instead of writing and recording a new episode, your humble hosts are going to History Camp this weekend. We’ll leave you with two stories about Boston’s weird neighborhood history from our back catalog. We’ll be sharing a story from Jamaica Plain about a politically motivated crime in the early 20th century that led to a series of running gunfights between the police and what the newspapers called “desperadoes.” Then, we’re going to move across town to Brighton, which — speaking of desperadoes — used to be home to saloons, card games, and hard drinking cowboys, when it hosted New England’s largest cattle market.