Grating the Nutmeg

Our guest, Elisabeth Petry is a journalist. She knows how to uncover a clue, follow a lead, and tell a good story. Her mother was bestselling novelist Ann Petry, whose 1946 debut novel The Street became the first novel by an African American to sell more than a million copies. In this episode, Liz tells us more about her family tree—the James and Lane Families—four generations of strivers and achievers descended from self-emancipated slaves, who settled in New Haven, Hartford, and Old Saybrook, Connecticut. Four hundred family letters survive, many of which contained stories that were fodder for Ann Petry's novels. Hear more about how Liz and two of her cousins are taking the family's story to the screen. We join Steve Courtney at the Mark Twain House & Museum as he introduces the lecture from which this podcast was recorded.

We wish to thank our guest Elisabeth Petry and the host for the lecture, the Mark Twain House & Museum. Read more about Liz's search for her family history in the Fall 2019 issue of Connecticut Explored where you'll also find Martha Hall Kelly's story about Caroline Ferriday. You can listen to our podcast with Kelly in episode 34 and to hear more about Barbara Beeching's research on the black middle class in Hartford, listen to Episode 53 of Grating the Nutmeg. For more information on the James Family project and documentary go to https://www.jamesfamilyletters.com/

This episode was produced by Mary Donohue, Assistant Publisher of Connecticut Explored, and engineered by Patrick O'Sullivan.

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Every Governor of our state makes history, but there have been very few who know their history as well as Connecticut's current governor Edward M. "Ned" Lamont."

In this very special episode, Mary Donohue and Walt Woodward, along with Connecticut Explored publisher Elizabeth Normen and producer Patrick O'Sullivan went to the state capitol to talk with Governor Lamont about a speech – and now audio essay he recorded for this podcast – titled "100 Years of Fake News and Real and Fake Wars."

In an era when Americans are challenged to separate fact from fiction in a myriad of different media, the Governor's message is a kind of cautionary tale for all of us. And, as you'll see, it reflects some keen and insightful thinking from a governor who takes his history seriously.

Four hundred years ago, in August 1619, more than 20 kidnapped enslaved African people were sold to the Virginia colonists. Slavery was well established in the early Connecticut Colony, too. Traded, sold, given as gifts, and subjected to beatings as documents attest, the enslaved people of Hartford suffered no less than enslaved people anywhere. In today's episode, Connecticut Explored's Mary Donohue finds out about an innovative, model project that uses fine-grained scholarship to uncover the lives of almost 500 Africans, African Americans, and Native Americans buried between 1640 and 1815 in Hartford's oldest historic site, the Ancient Burying Ground. She talks with Dr. Kathy Hermes, professor at Central Connecticut State University, about the project, sponsored by the Ancient Burying Ground Association and about the new website that makes all this research available with a click of a mouse.

For more information, visit the new website at www.africannativeburialsct.org. Join us on September 12, 2019 at 6 p.m. at the Hartford History Center, Hartford Public Library, 500 Main Street, in downtown Hartford for a free lecture by Dr. Hermes "Uncovering Their History: African, African American and Native Americans Buried in Hartford's Ancient Burying Ground, 1640-1815" that will launch the website. To learn more about how to research Hartford's early black community, join Dr. Hermes for a workshop at the Hartford History Center, October 5, 2019, 11 a.m., also free to the public. And come view the exhibition at the Hartford History Center: Uncovering the Ancient Burying Ground, an exhibition featuring historic photos, maps, drawings, and postcards.

This episode was produced by Mary Donohue, assistant publisher, Connecticut Explored, and engineered by Patrick O'Sullivan. Visual art by coramarshall.com.

To order a Fall 2019 issue of Connecticut Explored with a feature article by Dr. Hermes about this project, go to ctexplored.org.

Subscribe to Connecticut Explored and get the upcoming Winter issue with stories about events or inventions that disrupted history. Subscribe, buy back issues and collections—including a make-your-own collection at a special price—at ctexplored.org.

To hear more episodes of Grating the Nutmeg subscribe on iTunes, IHeartRadio, GooglePlay, Spotify or at gratingthenutmeg.libsyn.com

Food historian and author of Pizza in New Haven Colin M. Caplin tells State Historian Walt Woodward and co-host Betsy Golden Kellem the fascinating story of the creation and rise to world-class celebrity of New Haven Pizza.

Join us at Modern Apizza in New Haven for a lunch-time food and information feast you won't want to miss.

And at the end, you'll hear about a special offer that might have you joining Walt Betsy and Colin for another podcast lunch and another slice of New Haven Pizza.

In this installment of GTN, Natalie Belanger of the Connecticut Historical Society takes a walk through the museum's archival collection of documents related to the Ku Klux Klan. You'll learn about the Klan's sudden rise, and rapid fall, in 1920s Connecticut, a dark time when Connecticut was torn by disagreements over immigration policy and the changing demographics of United States.

To learn more, you can join Natalie at the Connecticut Historical Society on September 14, 2019 for a gallery program related to this topic, or visit the CHS's Research Center anytime to view the Ku Klux Klan documents yourself.

This episode was produced by Natalie Belanger and engineered by Patrick O'Sullivan.

To hear more episodes of Grating the Nutmeg subscribe on iTunes, iHeartRadio, GooglePlay, Spotify or at gratingthenutmeg.libsyn.com. And for more great Connecticut history stories, subscribe to Connecticut Explored, the magazine of Connecticut history, at ctexplored.org Please leave a review on iTunes for Grating the Nutmeg-we'd appreciate it!

In this Gate-leg Table interview with state historian Walt Woodward, transportation historian Richard DeLuca takes us on an expert's tour of Connecticut's long history of charging people to get from here to there. From turnpikes to bicycle roads, the state highway system to the parkways and toll roads Connecticut got rid of in the 1980s, DeLuca provides the background you need to make good decisions about The Toll Question in Connecticut. DeLuca is the author of POST ROADS AND IRON HORSES and PAVED ROADS AND PUBLIC MONEY, forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press.

Two of Connecticut's most influential women, Beatrice Fox Auerbach, the owner of G. Fox, the largest privately-owned department store in the United States at the time and U.S. Congresswoman Chase Going Woodhouse, the second woman to be elected to the US Congress from Connecticut, spent seven weeks travelling through 10 countries in the Middle East and Europe in 1949. Only four years after the end of WWII and one year after the founding of the new nation of Israel, Auerbach and Woodhouse were shown battlefields, refugee camps, and the ruins of German cities. Auerbach's diary entries reveal what she saw and experienced-civil war in Greece, Arab refugee camps in Transjordan, the value of using Hebrew in Israel, and the fear of rising anti-Semitism and communism in Germany. In this episode, edited from a lecture given at the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Hartford, Dr. Tracey Wilson comments on Auerbach and Woodhouse's contribution to the development of women in leadership roles in Connecticut and reads from Mrs. Auerbach's travel diaries. Both women are in the Connecticut Women's Hall of Fame.

Dr. Wilson received her Ph. D in history from Brown University and serves as the West Hartford Town Historian. To listen to the full lecture or view the videotape, contact the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Hartford. The Auerbach diaries are in the collection of the Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford, and the papers of Chase Going Woodhouse are in the collection of the Dodd Center, University of Connecticut at Storrs. To hear more about G. Fox Dept Store, listen to Episode 73 of Grating the Nutmeg, "Dept Stores, G. Fox and the Black Freedom Movement".

This episode was produced by Mary Donohue and engineered by Patrick O'Sullivan.

To hear more episodes of Grating the Nutmeg subscribe on itunes, iHeartRadio, GooglePlay, Spotify or at gratingthenutmeg.libsyn.com. And for more great Connecticut history stories, subscribe to Connecticut Explored, the magazine of Connecticut history, at ctexplored.org

This episode was produced by Natalie Belanger and engineered by Patrick O'Sullivan.

To hear more episodes of Grating the Nutmeg subscribe on itunes, iHeartRadio, GooglePlay, SoundCloud or at gratingthenutmeg.libsyn.com. And for more great Connecticut history stories, subscribe to Connecticut Explored, the magazine of Connecticut history, at ctexplored.org

BONUS CONTENT: LECTURE ONLY

In Part 2 of our Series Commemorating the 250th Anniversary of the Founding of Dartmouth College and Its Roots in the town of Columbia. Mohegan Elder Beth Regan tells the story of Samson Occom. Occom, a Mohegan convert to Christianity, was educated by Rev. Eleazar Wheelock, became a teacher and minister, raised much of the money used to establish Dartmouth, and went on to found the utopian native Christian community of Brothertown, New York. Occom's story as told by Mohegan elder Regan provides a different and importantperspective on Dartmouth's founding, one that is not to be missed.

This episode is dedicated to Mohegan Nonner and elder Faith Damon Davison, with whom Regan was to give her talk. She was prevented by the onset of an illness that led to her passing a few weeks later. A wise and wonderful person, Nonner Faith Damon Davison will be missed by all of us who knew her, -