Over the past few episodes, we’ve seen how Massachusetts troops drove the British back from Concord and Lexington to Boston, then created elaborate siege lines that kept the redcoats bottled up in the city, while the Americans controlled the surrounding countryside. 250 years ago this week, the focus of the war shifted from land to sea, with the British leveraging the immense tactical advantage that their navy gave them in projecting power on the ocean and along the coast. To try to offset the hardship of the American siege, the British used their naval power to find food in the Boston Harbor Islands, first on Grape Island, near today’s Weymouth and Hingham, then at Noddles and Hog Islands, which form most of today’s East Boston. At Grape Island, the Americans put up a spirited but largely ineffective defense, but the skirmish we remember as the battle of Chelsea Creek became an important turning point for the Americans. This was the first operation where soldiers from different colonies worked together in a coordinated effort; the first time the rebellious New Englanders used artillery in battle; and the first time Americans engaged and actually captured a British warship.

Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/327/

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Every Bostonian knows Fort Ticonderoga as the source of the cannons that Henry Knox brought to Boston, secretly hauled to the top of Dorchester Heights in the middle of the night, and used to drive the redcoats out of Boston forever. We’ll cover that story later in our 250th anniversary season, but this week I want to think about the other end of the chain. Before Henry Knox could bring his noble train of artillery to Boston, somebody had to take those cannons, and the fort they belonged to, from the redcoats. We usually give credit for the daring capture of Fort Ticonderoga to Ethan Allen, whose homestead you can visit outside Burlington, Vermont these days. The capture is actually at least as much a Boston story as it is a Vermont story, as the orders to capture the fort were issued by our local patriots. We forget about this part of the story because the officer who was chosen to lead the expedition to Fort Ti was one of the greatest heroes of the revolution, right up until the point when he became one of history’s greatest traitors. That’s right, Benedict Arnold.

Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/326/

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From the moment the April 19, 1775 battle of Lexington and Concord ended until the British gave up and evacuated the city in March 1776, Boston was the epicenter of the American War for Independence. After eleven months of under siege, Boston was effectively independent after the British evacuation, never being under serious threat of re-invasion after March 17, 1776. Unfortunately, the Siege of Boston started and ended before independence was declared in Philadelphia, so it’s usually forgotten in our retelling of our national origin story. For this week’s show, let’s linger on the siege to see how it came together 250 years ago this week, how colonial Bostonians decided whether they should stay in their homes or flee to the countryside, and where the battle lines were drawn upon the map of modern Boston. Over the course of the coming year, we’ll return to the siege of Boston several times to talk about battles and skirmishes, heroes and traitors, and generals and everyday Bostonians, but for now I want to set the stage with an episode about the early days of the siege in April and May of 1775.

Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/325/

Support us: http://patreon.com/HUBhistory/

Listen, my children, and you shall hear

This week marks the 250th anniversary of our American Revolution, with the first battles taking place in Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775. The night before, Paul Revere rode from Boston to Lexington to warn John Hancock and Samuel Adams that the British regulars were coming out that night. Most Americans have a mental image of a lone rider in the night carrying the fate of the nation and the future of independence with him. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “The Landlord’s Tale, or Paul Revere’s Ride” is largely responsible for that image, but is it accurate? This week, we retell the story of Paul Revere’s ride by looking at Longfellow’s poem alongside two versions of the night’s events that were told by Paul Revere in his own words.

Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/324/

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222 years ago, on March 22, 1803, a teenaged sailor named John R Jewitt from Boston, Lincolnshire was onboard the ship Boston from Boston, Massachusetts when it was captured in Nootka Sound on the west coast of today’s Vancouver Island in Canada by a powerful king of the Nuu-Chah-Nulth people. For almost three years, Jewitt and one other survivor from the Boston were enslaved by the king Maquinna, during which time Jewitt kept a journal that has become an important ethnographic study of indigenous life on the northwest coast of North America. Besides life among the Nuu-Chah-Nulth, this incident helps reveal the importance of Boston’s maritime economy in the years between independence and the war of 1812. It also joins our episodes on the ship Columbia and the Park Street missionaries to Hawaii in illustrating how Boston merchants and whalers had an outsized influence on the culture of the west coast, even before America laid claim to the region. How did John Jewitt ingratiate himself to his captors well enough to survive his ordeal, and how did he manage to concoct an escape long after it seemed that all hope was lost? Listen now!

Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/323/

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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.

Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/322/

Support us: http://patreon.com/HUBhistory/

On Tuesday, March 18, I’ll be talking about the first streetlights in Boston, which came over from England on the forgotten fourth tea ship in 1773, and managed to survive the tea party and a shipwreck, before falling victim to Boston politics on the eve of revolution. It will be a virtual talk on Zoom, so you can tune in from wherever you are at 7pm. Register now!

Elena Palladino has a bachelors from Simmons College and masters degrees in literary and cultural studies from Carnegie Mellon University and in higher education from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. She works in the President’s office at Smith College and lives in Ware, Mass, where many of the residents displaced from the four towns that were flooded to create the Quabbin moved to. In our conversation, you’ll learn about the surprisingly personal connection to the dam project that she discovered after moving into her home in Ware that inspired her to write her first book on the construction of the Quabbin.