20th Century Archives

Fifty Years Later: Where’s Boston? with Lauren Graves (episode 355)

In this episode, we’re turning the clocks back to 1976, when America and Boston were in the midst of a massive celebration marking the Bicentennial. While other ideas were considered and discarded, Boston would mark the bicentennial with a series of thoughtful events around the city throughout 1976. To highlight the living city, photographer Constantine Manos was charged with a mission “to photograph the people of the city, of all walks of life, for an exhibition and book to commemorate the 1976 bi-centenntial of American independence from England.” The result of his effort was Where’s Boston, described as “a multi‐image, quadraphonic sound show and a graphic display of Boston today.” Over the course of the summer of ’76, tens of thousands of Bostonians and visitors streamed into the exhibit hall at the Prudential Center to see themselves reflected in the photographer’s lens. This summer, the Boston Athenaeum will revisit that optimistic vision of Boston in 1976 with the exhibition Where’s Boston? 50 Years Later. In this episode, curator Lauren Graves chats with Nikki about the project.

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A Firestorm in Dorchester (episode 353)

On May 22, 1964, sixty-two years ago this week, a fire that broke out on a back porch in Dorchester. The Bellflower Street fire grew so fast and burned so intensely that it created its own weather, creating a literal firestorm and leaving the fire department struggling to contain it. Columns of smoke and flame licked the sky, while every available firefighter from Boston and over two dozen suburban towns raced to the scene to make a desperate stand. When the smoke cleared, 35 buildings had burned and 300 people were homeless.

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The Duke: Weekly Conversations With The Last Honest Politician, with Scott Kerman (episode 350)

This week, we chat with Scott Kerman, whose new book about Governor Mike Dukakis is The Duke: Weekly Conversations With The Last Honest Politician: A Political Giant and a Comedian Walk Into a Kitchen. This book is very different from the typical political biography, and I think we could have a serious conversation about whether it “counts” as history, but the fact remains that Michael Dukakis was a major party presidential candidate and remains the longest serving governor of the Commonwealth. When The Duke dropped almost a year ago, I was shocked to learn that it’s the first book about Governor Dukakis in decades, and the only one to include a wider focus than the 1988 presidential race. As you will hear in a few moments, as a humorist and comedian, Scott approaches this book very differently from most biographers, but if you have any interest in Governor Dukakis, you will want to tune in.

Continue reading The Duke: Weekly Conversations With The Last Honest Politician, with Scott Kerman (episode 350)

Allan Rohan Crite: Griot of Boston and Urban Glory, with Michelle LeBlanc (episode 343)

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.

Continue reading Allan Rohan Crite: Griot of Boston and Urban Glory, with Michelle LeBlanc (episode 343)

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.

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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.

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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.

Continue reading The Silenced Muse: Emily Hale, T.S. Eliot, and the Role of a Lifetime, with Sara Fitzgerald (episode 319)

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.

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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.

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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.

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