Tag: interview

The Importance of Being Furnished, with Tripp Evans and Erica Lome (episode 308)

This week, Erica Lome and Tripp Evans join the show to discuss a new exhibit at the Eustis Estate called “The Importance of Being Furnished.”  In the wake of Oscar Wilde’s 1882 lecture tour focusing on The House Beautiful, outlandishly decorated bachelor households became an aspirational style that helped define American homes from the Gilded Age to the Jazz Era.  The new Aesthetic Movement brought beauty and artistic sensibility to American homes, replacing conservative styles that reinforced traditional morality.  “The Importance of Being Furnished” introduces four decorators who helped revolutionize interior design during this period: Charles Gibson, Ogden Codman, Charles Pendleton, and Henry Sleeper, as well as their homes in Boston’s Back Bay, Gloucester, Lincoln, and Providence.  In their own time, all four men were known as bachelor aesthetes, born into privileged families but hiding their queerness to greater or lesser degrees in an era when homosexuality was punishable by jail time in Boston.  In this interview, exhibit curators Tripp Evans and Erica Lome will tell us how these men took inspiration from their personal lives in decorating their own homes, and how they leveraged those lavish homes into careers in decorating for everyone from robber barons to Hollywood stars.


Continue reading The Importance of Being Furnished, with Tripp Evans and Erica Lome (episode 308)

A Light Under the Dome, with Patrick Gabridge (episode 307)

This week, Patrick Gabridge joins us to talk about his new play “A Light Under the Dome,” which opens at the Massachusetts State House on August 12. The first in a series of works exploring the intersection between abolition and suffrage in the 19th and early 20th centuries, A Light Under the Dome recreates a specific moment in history that took place under the dome of the Massachusetts State House 186 years ago. Angelina Grimke grew up in Charleston, South Carolina in a family of enslavers, witnessing the cruelty of America’s peculiar institution under her own roof. Leaving her comfortable life behind, she risked threats and acts of violence to become a radical abolitionist. Listen to this conversation with Patrick to learn how she got invited to speak to the Massachusetts legislature, why her address was groundbreaking, and how she tied the cause of abolition to the novel idea of rights for women.


Continue reading A Light Under the Dome, with Patrick Gabridge (episode 307)

A Constitutional Culture: New England and the Struggle Against Arbitrary Rule in the Restoration Empire, with Professor Adrian Chastain Weimer (episode 295)

In this episode, I’m joined by Professor Adrian Chastain Weimer, author of the recent book A Constitutional Culture: New England and the Struggle Against Arbitrary Rule in the Restoration Empire.  The book focuses on the period just after King Charles II returned the Stuarts to the English throne, during which he when he sought revenge against Boston Puritans for their perceived role in the execution of his father.  Decades before the absolute rule of Edmund Andros, the crown sent four royal commissioners to Boston with secret orders that would upend every facet of public life, from voting to worship to the code of laws.  Our conversation explores how the colonists defended their liberty within the constitutional system of colonial Massachusetts under restoration rule.


Continue reading A Constitutional Culture: New England and the Struggle Against Arbitrary Rule in the Restoration Empire, with Professor Adrian Chastain Weimer (episode 295)

A History of Boston, with Daniel Dain (episode 288)

Daniel Dain is the author of an ambitious new history of Boston, called A History of Boston. A few years ago, a listener got in touch with the show to say that he was a lawyer by trade, but working on a manuscript on Boston history by night.  When he shared the manuscript with me, I was shocked by it’s sweeping scope, and impressed when a bound copy found its way to my door earlier this year. A History of Boston blends his interest in urbanism and his deep love of Boston history to describe a series of boom and bust cycles in the longterm health and viability of Boston. I will ask him not only what has happened in Boston’s past but also what challenges and opportunities he sees on the horizon.


Continue reading A History of Boston, with Daniel Dain (episode 288)

King Hancock: The Radical Influence of a Moderate Founding Father, with Brooke Barbier (episode 286)

In King Hancock, the Radical Influence of a Moderate Founding Father, Brooke Barbier paints the portrait of a walking contradiction: one of the wealthiest men in the colonies, but a man of the people; a merchant who made his fortune in the warm embrace of empire, but signed his name first for independence; and an enslaver who called for freedom. Perhaps most of all, he’s portrayed as a moderate in a town of radicals.  Hancock didn’t leave behind the same carefully preserved, indexed, and cross referenced lifetime of papers like our old friend John Adams.  He wasn’t immortalized as the indispensable man, like George Washington.  But Brooke weaves together the details that can be found in portraits, artifacts, official records, and surviving letters to create a nuanced portrait of a founder who should be remembered for more than a famous signature.


Continue reading King Hancock: The Radical Influence of a Moderate Founding Father, with Brooke Barbier (episode 286)

Disrupting Time: Industrial Combat, Espionage, and the Downfall of a Great American Company, with Aaron Stark (episode 284)

This week, Aaron Stark joins the show to discuss his new book Disrupting Time: Industrial Combat, Espionage, and the Downfall of a Great American Company, which chronicles an attempt by a foreign power to infiltrate, emulate, and eventually annihilate a great American company.  In the late 19th century, watches were at the forefront of technological innovation, and the Waltham Watch Company made some of the finest watches in the world.  Unlike their Swiss competitors, whose products were fancy, handcrafted works of art, the Watham company specialized in mass produced, affordable, and reliable watches for the masses.  At an 1876 World’s Fair, they announced their arrival on the world’s stage, and the world took notice.  The Swiss, in particular, took notice, and they took it by sending spies to steal the secrets of Waltham’s success.


Continue reading Disrupting Time: Industrial Combat, Espionage, and the Downfall of a Great American Company, with Aaron Stark (episode 284)

The Lioness of Boston, with Emily Franklin (episode 283)

Isabella Stewart Gardner was a consummate collector, generous philanthropist, and rabid Red Sox fan.  Today, she’s best known as the namesake of an art museum in Boston’s Fenway neighborhood (and if we’re being honest, the museum is probably best known for a famous 1990 heist).  This week, Jake interviews author Emily Franklin, whose new novel The Lioness of Boston explores the person behind the Gardner fortune.  They discuss the great romance, tragedy, and scandal of Isabella’s life, the different personas she tried on throughout different eras of her life, and her obsession with the idea of a legacy.  Emily will tell us why Boston at first turned up its nose at wealthy young Isabella, but later came to embrace the flamboyant and eccentric Mrs Jack as one of our most colorful and generous characters. Emily will also describe what makes historical fiction different from biography, and the freedom and limitations that the genre brings.  


Continue reading The Lioness of Boston, with Emily Franklin (episode 283)

Revolution’s Edge, with Patrick Gabridge and Nikki Stewart (episode 276)

The new play “Revolution’s Edge” will debut at Old North Church in June 2023.  It tells the story of three Bostonians and their families on the eve of the Revolution.  Mather Byles is the Loyalist rector of Old North Church, Cato is an African American man who’s enslaved by Byles, and John Pulling is a whiggish ship’s captain and member of the Old North vestry.  The three men have very different stations in life, but they all have young families with intertwined lives, and on April 18, 1775, they all had very different decisions to make about those lives.  My guests this week are Patrick Gabridge, producing artistic director of the Plays in Place theater company, and Nikki Stewart, executive director of Old North Illuminated.  Together, they’ll tell us how this, um, revolutionary new drama came to be.


Continue reading Revolution’s Edge, with Patrick Gabridge and Nikki Stewart (episode 276)

Frank Hart: the First Black Ultrarunning Star, with Davy Crockett (episode 265)

Frank Hart was a transplant to Boston who became a famous star in a sport that no longer really exists.  Hart was a pedestrian, competing in grueling six-day races where the winner was the person who could run, walk, or even crawl the most miles by the time the clock ran out.  He made his debut in the Bean Pot Tramp here in Boston, but he followed the money to races in New York, London, San Francisco, and beyond, becoming one of America’s first famous Black athletes.  However, Frank Hart’s career declined along with the popularity of pedestrianism, while the rise of Jim Crow raised new hurdles for a Black competitor.  Joining us this week to discuss the rise and fall of Frank Hart is Davy Crockett, the host of the Ultrarunning History podcast and author of the new biography Frank Hart: The First Black Ultrarunning Star.


Continue reading Frank Hart: the First Black Ultrarunning Star, with Davy Crockett (episode 265)

The Nazis of Copley Square, with Professor Charles R Gallagher (episode 258)

Professor Charles R Gallagher’s recent book The Nazis of Copley Square: The Forgotten Story of the Christian Front is an in depth accounting of an organization that was wildly popular in Boston and beyond in the years before the US entered World War II.  The Christian Front was deeply rooted in Catholic doctrines, but the value at its core was a form of anticommunism that members treated as interchangeable with antisemitism.  Professor Gallagher will tell us how the group was founded and how the doctrine of Catholic Action and the Mystical Body of Christ theory enabled their hateful ideology.  He’ll also introduce the intellectual leaders of the group, the streetfighters who led it down the primrose path to paramilitarism, and the Nazi spymaster who turned the group toward treason.  


Continue reading The Nazis of Copley Square, with Professor Charles R Gallagher (episode 258)