Tag: interview

Burgoyne’s Thespians and Boston’s First Theater Season, with Susan Lester

With the British military occupying Boston and patriots laying siege to the city, conditions in Boston deteriorated in the early weeks of 1776, with shortages of food, firewood, insulation, and almost everything leading to desperate circumstances.  Against this grim background, audiences flocked to a makeshift playhouse to watch Boston’s first season of theater, including a play called “The Blockade of Boston” that premiered 250 years ago this week, only to be interrupted by a real life attack on the British lines in Charlestown.  Our first listener-guest, Dr. Susan Lester, joins us this week to describe what her research has revealed about the legality of theater in colonial Boston, the format of a typical 18th century performance, and even the identities of a few of the actors who tread the boards at Faneuil Hall in January 1776.


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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)

Interpreting Christmas, with Ken Turino

In this episode, Nikki is joined by Ken Turino, a public history career professional and expert on the interpretation of Christmas at historic sites. This week, they’ll be talking about the Boston origins of some of our favorite Christmas traditions, like Christmas cards and Christmas trees. They will also be talking about Ken’s new book Interpreting Christmas at Museums and Historic Sites, which offers practical guidance on how to use holiday cheer to engage interested visitors without alienating those who don’t celebrate.


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Inventing the Boston Game: Football, Soccer, and the Origins of a National Myth, with Kevin Tallec Marston and Mike Cronin (episode 340)

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.


Continue reading Inventing the Boston Game: Football, Soccer, and the Origins of a National Myth, with Kevin Tallec Marston and Mike Cronin (episode 340)

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.


Continue reading The Hard Work of Hope, with Michael Ansara (episode 336)

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.


Continue reading The Battle of Bunker Hill at 250, with Mike Troy of the American Revolution Podcast (episode 329)

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.


Continue reading Water for Boston, part 3 – Lost Towns of the Swift River Valley: Drowned by the Quabbin, with Elena Palladino (episode 322)

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.


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

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)