This will be our 2025 Thanksgiving episode, and nothing says Thanksgiving quite like football… At least for most people, I guess. Somehow, the gene for caring about football missed me. The last football game I saw was a Super Bowl, and cohost emerita Nikki remembered that Beyonce sang Formation that year, which means it must have been 2016. All that to say that if the new book Inventing the Boston Game: Football, Soccer, and the Origins of a National Myth can get me interested in the early history of football, it can do it for anyone. Inventing the Boston Game follows the story of a group of upper-class Boston private school boys who called themselves the Oneida foot ball club. During the height of the Civil War in 1862, they started playing a ball game on Boston Common. Authors Mike Cronin and Kevin Tallec Marston join us this week to discuss how generations have argued about whether their Boston Game was some of the first soccer in the US or the first organized American football team. Especially after a group of teammates placed a stone monument on Boston Common 100 years ago this week, it was clear that they were deliberately inserting themselves into American sports history, but a century later it is hard to tell how much of their shared mythology was true.
Tag: interview
The Battle of Bunker Hill at 250, with Mike Troy of the American Revolution Podcast (episode 329)
June 17th, 2025 will mark the 250th anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill, which was the largest Revolutionary War battle to take place in the Boston area and the bloodiest battle of the war (at least on the British side). Following the outbreak of war in April, the siege of Boston soon became a stalemate, but until Bunker Hill, British officers expected the American provincial army to evaporate the first time they came face to face with the fearsome power of the King’s army. Fought over a year before America declared independence, Bunker Hill proved this assumption wrong, with the redcoats suffering devastating casualties, even though they defeated the Americans in a pyrrhic victory. In just a few minutes, I’m going to be joined by Mike Troy, host of the American Revolution Podcast. Together, we’re going to uncover where the battle was fought and how you can find traces of the battlefield in today’s Charlestown. We’ll look at the officers and men on both sides of the battle, and what the experience of battle was like for the untested American militia soldiers, as well as the lessons that both sides learned from the carnage of June 17, 1775.
Water for Boston, part 3 – Lost Towns of the Swift River Valley: Drowned by the Quabbin, with Elena Palladino (episode 322)
This week, we’re speaking with Elena Palladino, the author of the recent book Lost Towns of the Swift River Valley: Drowned by the Quabbin. This book outlines the 20th century development of Boston’s modern water supply system through the eyes of the residents of the four towns in north central Massachusetts that were sacrificed to create the Quabbin reservoir: Greenwich, Enfield, Dana, and Prescott. The story is bookended by the farewell ball, held on the night when the four towns legally ceased to exist, and largely told by following the lives of three prominent valley residents. The book reaches back to the last ice age to describe the forces that shaped the Swift River valley into the ideal site for a reservoir, to English colonization to explain why the valley remained less populated and less developed into the 1930s, and thus easier to take through eminent domain, and forward to today to understand the immense benefits modern Bostonians enjoy thanks to the sacrifice of Swift River valley residents of a century ago.
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.
Continue reading Martin Luther King’s Boston, with Dr. Imari Paris Jeffries (episode 320)
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.
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.
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.