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 Tellec 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.

Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/340/

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Mike Cronin is the Academic Director of Boston College in Ireland and a Professor of History in the Irish Studies Program at Boston College. He’s published books on everything from the history of Saint Patrick’s Day to soccer in Ireland.

Kevin Tellec Marston is a Research Fellow at the The International Centre for Sports Studies, or CIES to use the French acronym, and also a Visiting Researcher and Lecturer at the International Centre for Sports History and Culture at De Montfort University. He has written about the evolution of FIFA rules, corruption in professional sports, and many other topics at the intersection of history and athletics.

In this episode, we’ll revisit two murder trials that were held in revolutionary Boston. The first case was against four ordinary sailors accused of murdering an officer of the Royal Navy on a ship in Massachusetts coastal waters, and the other was against nine British prisoners of war who were accused of murdering a guard aboard a prison ship in Boston Harbor. The sailors were accused in 1769, when Boston was under military occupation and the tensions that would result in the Boston Massacre were coming to a head. The redcoats stood trial over a decade later, in the midst of a bloody war that had touched the lives of all Bostonians by 1780. In both cases, attorneys and judges worried whether a jury could deliver justice in a polarized city. Both cases were argued by signers of the Declaration of Independence, with John Adams defending the American sailors in 1780 and Robert Treat Paine prosecuting the redcoats in 1780. In both cases, the defendants argued that they had acted in self defense, and amazingly, both cases ended in acquittal.

Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/339/

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

In October 1855, exactly 170 years ago this week, Boston hosted the third annual exhibition of the United States Agricultural Society, a grand five-day event that was lauded in the press as “a greater show of cattle and horses than has ever been given previously in the world.” Set on a newly created, fifty-acre fairground in the South End, the exhibition showcased Boston’s civic pride and economic power at a time when agriculture was still a primary driver of the American economy. While originally envisioned to showcase a range of crops, fruits, and agricultural implements, the Boston fair ultimately focused almost entirely on livestock and featured a significant amount of horse and harness racing, which was controversial in a city with a reputation for uptight conservatism. The event was promoted as a wholesome, family-friendly affair, with extensive amenities for women and children, deliberately distancing itself from the rough-and-tumble reputation of traditional cattle markets. The exhibition successfully attracted throngs of visitors, offered over $10,000 in cash prizes, and drew national attention, ultimately contributing to the popularity of harness racing in New England and strengthening the case for federal support of scientific agriculture.

Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/338/

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

I intended to include many more pictures, but some of my key sources are offline this week!

250 years ago today, a letter from George Washington revealed a devastating secret: there was a British spy at the highest level of patriot leadership.  The traitor was none other than Dr. Benjamin Church, a man who seemed to embody the American cause.  He was a Harvard-educated physician who had been appointed as our first surgeon general, he was a close confidant of leaders like Samuel Adams and Joseph Warren, and he was officially in charge of organizing the war effort as head of the Massachusetts Committee of Safety.  Church had risked his life for liberty and was trusted with the revolution’s deepest political and military secrets, but a coded letter, a secret mistress, and a suspicious baker would unravel a web of deceit that would make Benedict Arnold blush.

Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/337/

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

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.

Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/336/

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

The Hard Work of Hope is Michael Ansara’s memoir of the 1960s in Boston. Ansara is probably best known as one of the key leaders of Students for a Democratic Society at Harvard and an outspoken antiwar leader during the Vietnam years. He was also a reporter for Ramparts and the founder of an underground paper called the Old Mole, he operated a grocery co-op in Dorchester, and he was one of the founders of the Mass Fair Share movement, that campaigned for tax relief, utility rate caps, and other economic justice issues in the Bay State. Today, he’s a published poet and one of the founders of Mass Poetry, and he’s a proud father and grandfather.

In this episode, we will learn about two important developments in the siege of Boston 250 years ago this month, in September 1775. First, we’ll learn about the invasion of Quebec that Benedict Arnold launched out of Boston that month, in hopes of winning over Canadian hearts and minds. If you have ever wondered why Canada isn’t part of the United States, we can probably chalk that up to Arnold’s ill-fated expedition, as well as the 150 years of conflict between Canadians and New Englanders that had gone before. We will also learn about the riflemen who made up much of the invasion force. Recruited from the backwoods of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and what’s now West Virginia, these exotic troops were treated as celebrities when they first arrived at the Continental camp in Cambridge, but the bloom was soon off the rose. As we’ll hear, some of the riflemen staged the first mutiny in the Continental Army 250 years ago this week, until they were personally subdued by George Washington near Union Square in today’s Somerville.

Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/335/

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

After the Battle of Bunker Hill in June, the siege of Boston reverted to a stalemate through the summer of 1775. While Benedict Arnold would lead some of the Continentals north from Cambridge into Canada and Henry Knox tried to wrestle Fort Ticonderoga’s cannons south from upstate New York to Cambridge, there was not a lot of action around Boston. Instead, as we’ll explore in this episode, the focus shifted to preparation, with riflemen from the far western frontier in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Maryland joining the lines, with Continentals building new forts to consolidate their siege lines, and with the redcoats venting their frustrations on Boston’s Liberty Tree. We’ll also see how the new Continental commander in chief, George Washington, could barely be restrained from ordering a direct, frontal assault on the superior British force in Boston, even though there wasn’t enough ammunition in the Continental camp to go around.

Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/334/

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

In this episode, we go in search of a Black Bostonian who was “well known” to his contemporaries, including Boston newspapers, but who was all but forgotten by history. If not for a one-paragraph news article and work by historians to reconstruct aspects of his life from notarial records, we may not know the name Caesar Marion. In this somewhat brief episode, we’re going to look at why Mr. Marion was thrown into Boston’s notorious jail 250 years ago this week, and then we’ll compare his treatment inside British-occupied Boston with the experience of Black volunteers in the Continental Army outside Boston, once Virginia enslaver George Washington took command.

Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/333/

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

In July 1775, the siege of Boston was approaching its peak, with the New England militias that had been surrounding Boston itself since April coalescing into the brand new Continental Army and the British dug in within the city to protect the vital harbor. 250 years ago this week, Continental officers planned a daring raid on Boston Harbor, essentially taking them deep into hostile territory, since the mighty Royal Navy ruled the waters. The objective of this raid, or rather raids, because there were two of them, was Boston Light. Marking the entrance to Boston Harbor since 1716, this humble lighthouse became an important strategic target, during a phase of the war where Britain’s presence in Boston was only possible because of a boatlift connecting their supply lines from Long Wharf to Newcastle and Plymouth in old England. We’ll also see how the tide of battle could turn on the back of the simple New England whaleboat, which proved itself to be the 18th century equivalent of a stealth fighter in these engagements. (Parts of this episode originally aired in 2021 as episode 227.)

Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/332/

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

A while back, my niece Sophie convinced me to watch the Disney live action musical Newsies. The 1992 film features an 18 year old Christian Bale as a homeless New York City newsboy who organizes an unauthorized strike against the biggest newspapers in the city. The story is peppered through with real names, like Joseph Pulitzer and Teddy Roosevelt, so I was pretty sure it was at least loosely based on a real story, and it made me wonder if Boston’s newsboys had ever gone on an equally adorable strike. I uncovered the story of a real-life newsboy strike in Boston in 1894, but it didn’t have that much in common with the movie. In the course of researching the 1894 strike, I learned a lot about newsboys as an emblem of child labor in Boston during the Progressive Era, at a time when reformers thought it better to provide protections that would legitimize child labor rather than eliminating it.

Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/331/

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