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/

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

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.

250 years ago this week, General Thomas Gage, the royal governor of Massachusetts and commander in chief of all British forces in North America, sent two British spies into the rural communities around Boston. He carefully selected two redcoats to go undercover, roaming highways and country lanes and taking painstaking notes about their terrain and relative military advantages. First they surveyed the western roads to Worcester, then the northern roads to Concord, anticipating a spring offensive against one town or the other. Unfortunately for them, however, their disguises weren’t as good as they hoped, and they were soon under nearly constant surveillance from patriot counterintelligence that left them in fear for their lives.

Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/321/

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