Before the Bomb Cyclone, before Superstorm Sandy, a historically severe storm hit Boston in 1804. Meteorologists say that the tropical cyclone would be counted as a category 2 hurricane today, with winds of 96 to 110 miles per hour. It wasn’t just the wind that made 1804 storm so memorable, although the wind was damaging enough, causing problems for industries representing a large sector of the early 19th economy and wrecking buildings that are major Freedom Trail attractions today. What made the storm so memorable was the fact that it was the first known tropical cyclone to carry snow, giving it the enduring nickname, the Snow Hurricane.

Please check out the full show notes at: http://HUBhistory.com/153/

And support the show on Patreon.

Starting in 1965, designers Peter Chermyeff and Tom Geismar designed the visual language of Boston’s transit network from the ground up. Over the next five years, their agency worked out every detail of the new MBTA’s visual identity, from the iconic T logo to the colors of the subway lines to cleaning up and modernizing stations.

They discuss this process in the September 2018 article “How Boston Got Its T.” Here’s an excerpt where they explain a couple of those decisions:

We also wanted to establish the identity of the system and flag it in the streetscape. People had an affinity for the song “Charlie on the MTA” and the name change to “MBTA” was too long. Our core team started thinking about different ways to make something work and eventually came up with simple “T.” It made sense as a name and image that would apply and be understandable at a distance or in conversation. It connects with all the words associated with the service: “transit,” “transportation,” “tunnel,” “tube,” and so on. It made all the sense in the world to go with “T” and have it displayed in a lollipop logo on trains, buildings, and streets.

Tom worked the logo out in great detail. We were unflinching in our recognition that this was not a truly original idea. Stockholm had already had a black “T” in a white circle for the Tunnelbana. It wasn’t necessary for us to be original, just to be right.

The lines themselves lacked identity, so we thought that color coding them would make huge difference. We applied the same process to all four lines. They had been identified by terminus, but most of those names were unclear to non-locals. I remember sitting in my Cambridge office preparing for a meeting with the MBTA in which I would be proposing colored lines. I had markers in front of me and I chose red for the line that went to Harvard since it’s a well-known institution whose main color is crimson. One line went up the North Shore of Boston up to the coastal areas, so it seemed obvious to call that the Blue Line. The line that serves Olmsted’s Emerald Necklace was an obvious choice for green. And then the fourth line ended up being orange for no particular reason beyond color balance. This was 20 years before the Silver Line was added.

That allowed us to give lines understood names. Instead of Harvard-Ashmont—no one visiting Boston knows what Ashmont is—now you have the Red Line. The presence of color reinforces that identity to help people find their way around.

Read the entire interview to learn how Arlington Street served as a model for an upgraded, modern station; how the team created our iconic T system map; or where the designers think their vision was implemented poorly.

Way back in episode 27, we reviewed the two cases of execution by fire in the history of Massachusetts, both of which involved enslaved women who were accused of crimes against their enslavers, and both of which involved male co-defendants who were hanged instead of being burned at the stake like the women. One of those co-defendants was named Mark, and his life is the topic of a brown bag lunch at noon on October 16 at the Massachusetts Historical Society titled “The Last & Living Words of Mark: Following the Clues to the Enslaved Man’s Life, Afterlife, and to his Community in Boston, Charlestown, and South Shore Massachusetts.”

A woman named Mariah, who was enslaved in the household of Joshua Lamb of Roxbury, allegedly set fire to the Lamb house and a neighboring house in July of 1681. While she was awaiting trial, a man named Jack who had escaped from his enslavers in Western Mass was also accused of an unrelated arson. The two defendants were tried at the same Court of Assistants in Boston, with Governor Simon Bradstreet presiding, and they were sentenced to death for the capital crime of arson. Samuel Sewall’s diary records that they were both executed on September 22, 1681. According to the sentence of the court, Mariah was burned to death, while Jack was hanged. When Jack was dead, in accordance with the sentence, his body was ”then taken doune & burnt to Ashes in the fire with Mariah.”

Not quite 75 years later, during the administration of Governor William Shirley, a woman named Phillis suffered a similar fate. In July of 1755, a Charlestown resident named John Codman died. After an inquest named arsenic poisoning as the cause of death, suspicion fell on the African Americans who were enslaved by Codman. Under questioning, a man named Mark admitted to leading a conspiracy to poison Codman with arsenic and a substance called black lead. He had acquired the poisons from neighbors who were enslaved by doctors, and then Codman’s enslaved cooks Phoebe and Phillis slipped the materials into his food. At trial, Phoebe turned state’s witness, while Phillis and Mark were convicted of the crime of petty treason: rising up against their legal owners. For her cooperation, Phoebe was shipped to a sugar plantation in the Caribbean, where life for enslaved laborers was brutal and short. Mark was sentenced to be hanged, and Phillis was sentenced to be burned to death. Both sentences were carried out on September 18, 1755.

Our earlier episode focused on the terrible fate of Phillis, barely mentioning Mark. After he was dead, his body was prepared for public display on Charlestown Common. His body would remain there for decades, becoming a well known public landmark. Historian Josiah Bartlett recorded how a surgeon on his way to join a regiment for service in the French and Indian War in 1758 stopped to examine Mark’s body. He wrote in his diary:

There’s no exact record of when Mark’s body was cut down or decomposed, but it remained a landmark when Paul Revere embarked on his famous ride 20 years later. In a 1798 letter to Jeremy Belknap, the minister and founder of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Revere described the beginning of his ride to Lexington: “I set off upon a very good Horse; it was then about 11 o’Clock, & very pleasant. After I had passed Charlestown Neck, & got nearly opposite where Mark was hung in chains, I saw two men on Horse back, under a Tree.”

Mark’s life and death is often seen as a footnote to Paul Revere’s famous ride, and even in our podcast, he was a footnote to the execution of Phillis by fire. The lunchtime talk by independent researcher Catherine Sasanov at MHS on October 16 will attempt to restore his humanity, putting Mark back in the center of his own story. Here’s how the MHS website describes the event:

Mark (1725-1755), a blacksmith, husband, and father, might have slipped from public memory if not for his brutal end: his body gibbeted for decades on Charlestown Common for the poisoning of his enslaver, John Codman. This project, grounded in Mark’s testimony, approaches “legal” and other documents as crime scenes; attention to clues, connections, and seemingly insignificant details unlock important, previously unrecognized aspects of Mark’s world, thwarting their original intent: the enforcement of slavery’s status quo.

The talk is free and open to the public, just pack a lunch to enjoy while Sasanov is speaking.

Between 1648 and 1688, four women were executed for witchcraft in Boston and Dorchester. Witchcraft can be loosely defined as the act of invoking evil spirits or consulting, covenanting with, entertaining, employing, feeding, or rewarding any evil spirit. In practice, it often meant the failure to conform. This week, we’re discussing the trials and executions of Margaret Jones, Alice Lake, Ann Hibbins, and Ann Glover, who fell victim to superstition and Puritan morality.

Please check out the full show notes at: http://HUBhistory.com/152/

And support the show on Patreon.

Witch Hunt Podcast host/ creator Nancy Mades-Byrd describes the series as a podcast about the history of scapegoating, and season one details the Salem witch trials.

To get you hooked, episode one asks the question – Why is Salem the witch hunt people remember? It examines the European roots of the Salem witch trials and features renowned author Frances Hill, author of “A Delusion of Satan.” In episode two, historian Dr. Mary Beth Norton discusses what was it about the villagers of Salem that made them the people most likely to unleash a witchcraft Hysteria. The ten episode season weaves together a compelling narratives and includes the reflections of direct descendants of some of the victims.

And for our upcoming event this week, we’re featuring a talk at Old South Meeting House that’s presented by the Friends of the Boston Harbor Islands and cosponsored by the group Boston Harbor Now called “Peddocks Island: Rich History, Vital Future.” Peddocks is the second largest of the 34 Boston Harbor Islands. Managed by the state Department of Conservation and Recreation, it is a favorite park for day trips from Boston and family camping, but the island also has a rich history.

There’s archaeological evidence, including the oldest human remains ever found in Massachusetts, that the island was long occupied by Native Americans. It was the site of one of the first interactions between European visitors and the indigenous population, when a French trading ship visited in about 1616. Early English colonist Thomas Morton recalled in his 1637 book A New English Canaan, “upon some distaste given in the Massachusetts bay by the Frenchmen, then trading there with the natives for beaver, they set upon the men at such advantage that they killed many of them, burned their ship, then riding at anchor by an island there, now called Peddocks island.” The survivors were taken as captives, with Morton writing that the victors, “distribut[ed] them unto five sachems, which were lords of the several territories adjoining: they did keep them so long as they lived.”

In more recent history, Peddocks island was home to Fort Andrews, which was designed during the Spanish American War era and played a role in Boston’s harbor defenses during both World Wars. Visitors today can explore the crumbling barracks and the concrete bunkers that use to house cannons so big that they broke windows every time they were fired. They can also visit a cottage community that is the last remnant of Boston’s early 20th century Portuguese-American fishing fleet. Over the years, the island played host to a healthy trade in bootlegging and speakeasies during prohibition, to a venue for Sunday baseball when Boston’s blue laws prevented such frivolity on land, and to an entrepreneurial group from the Passamaquoddy tribe of Maine who came all the way to Boston Harbor to hunt seals for a cash bounty.

Today, Peddocks Island is at a crossroads, and the quiet campground and historic fort where your humble hosts have spent many happy summer weekends are slated for redevelopment. Plans are on the table to bulldoze much of historic Fort Andrews and replace it with a luxury hotel and spa, an outdoor concert venue, and a conference center. With that context, here’s how the event at Old South Meeting House is described:

Peddocks Island, a series of drowned drumlins, is part of the Boston Harbor Islands National and State Park. It’s currently the largest of the 34 Boston Harbor Islands that is open to the public. Home to historic Fort Andrews, walking tours, geological features, and archaeological sites, the island is in the midst of an exciting redevelopment planning process led by Boston Harbor Now with the National Park Service and the Department of Conservation and Recreation. Cheri Ruane of Weston & Sampson Design Studio, lead consultant for the island’s development plan, and Alice Brown of Boston Harbor Now, will discuss fascinating highlights of the island’s past, present, and future.

The event will be held at 6:30pm on Thursday, October 10. It’s free and open to the public, but advanced registration is required. If you plan to attend, please listen with a skeptical ear for any whitewashing of a plan to convert one of Boston’s last great wild spaces to a luxury retreat open only to the elite.

From the mid-19th century through the nation’s centennial in 1876, some of Boston’s most important historic sites and attractions were destroyed or nearly so. Starting with the Beacon Hill home of founding father John Hancock in 1863, and going right through the 20th century, Old South Meetinghouse, the Old State House, the Old Corner Bookstore, and many other buildings that help lend Boston its unique character, were threatened with demolition in the name of progress. After early losses, Boston was faced with the prospect of midwestern cities like Chicago or St Louis buying up and moving iconic buildings in order to save them from the wrecking ball. Through this threat, Bostonians learned to value their cultural heritage and banded together to protect early historic sites, especially those connected to the Revolutionary War that were of importance to all Americans.

Please check out the full show notes at: http://HUBhistory.com/151/

And support the show on Patreon.

While our main story this week is going to focus on the manmade landscape of Boston, highlighting what has changed and what we believe to be worth saving, Remaking Boston: An Environmental History of the City and Its Surroundings takes a similar approach to the natural landscape. It’s divided into sections about the harbor, town and countryside, and the climate. This is a go-to source when I’m researching episodes like the story of the 17th century canal called the Mother Brook or how the need for improved sewers helped inspire Boston’s history of annexations. It is peppered through with illustrations, including maps, diagrams, and historic photos. In one effective sequence, the effect of climate change is illustrated by printing a series of photos showing natural processes: azaleas blossoming in the Arboretum, Lady Slippers blooming in the Stony Brook, or apples ripening for harvest. By printing a dated historic photo next to a dated modern photo of the same process, the authors create a vivid picture of our warming seasons, with lady slippers that used to bloom at the end of June now peaking in mid-May and apples that we used to pick in August now ripening in October.

Here’s an excerpt from the publisher’s description:

Situated on an isthmus, and blessed with a natural deepwater harbor and ocean access, Boston became an important early trade hub with Europe and the world. As its population and economy grew, developers extended the city’s shoreline into the surrounding tidal mudflats to create more useable land. Further expansion of the city was achieved through the annexation of surrounding communities, and the burgeoning population and economy spread to outlying areas. The interconnection of city and suburb opened the floodgates to increased commerce, services, and workforces, while also leaving a wake of roads, rails, bridges, buildings, deforestation, and pollution.

Profiling this ever-changing environment, the contributors tackle a variety of topics, including: the glacial formation of the region; physical characteristics and composition of the land and harbor; dredging, sea walling, flattening, and landfill operations in the reshaping of the Shawmut Peninsula; the longstanding controversy over the link between landfills and shoaling in shipping channels; population movements between the city and suburbs and their environmental implications; interdependence of the city and its suburbs; preservation and reclamation of the Charles River; suburban deforestation and later reforestation as byproducts of changing land use; the planned outlay of parks and parkways; and historic climate changes and the human and biological adaptations to them.

If you’re curious about the effect that both manmade and natural processes have had on the natural world underlying the city of Boston, check out Remaking Boston.

And since this week’s episode is all about the early days of historic preservation, our upcoming event will highlight present day efforts through the 2019 Preservation Achievement Awards.

The Boston Preservation Alliance works to ensure that our history carries on into our future. The BPA, a nonprofit organization, brings people and organizations together to influence the future of Boston’s historic buildings, landscapes, and communities. Through advocacy and education, the BPA attempts to create thoughtful change that protects the historic character that defines our city – important work in a city where 17th century structures are nestled into modern neighborhoods, and our modern architecture often lacks character.

The 31st annual Preservation Achievement Awards will be held on Monday, October 21, 2019, at the Revere Hotel, 200 Stuart Street, Boston. The event celebrates the BPAs mission of Protecting Places, Promoting Vibrancy, and Preserving Character.

Tickets are $150 through October 1, and $65 for young professionals under $40. Doors open at 5:30 pm and the evening will begin with food and drinks. Opening remarks begin at 6:00 pm and the party will continue after the Awards are bestowed—stay to mingle, network, and congratulate the honorees.

Among the awards that are annually presented are the Preservation Acheivmemt Awards, described as:

Neighborhoods are living things. They evolve to the changing needs of their inhabitants. Rural farms become streetcar suburbs. Carriage lanes become roads. Thriving businesses fade. The buildings and places that survive these changes become natural points of reference for the neighborhood and vessels of collective memory. They are physical touchpoints for residents today and tomorrow.

This year’s cohort of award winners shows that historic buildings and parks can adapt to the changing neighborhood around them. Historic structures add a splash of uniqueness to a contemporary brand. As the historic structures blossom with new life, they add an extra layer to the collective memory of the neighborhood.

Sometimes the best way to adapt is to restore and preserve, but with a focus on 21st-century needs. Our award winners illustrate that buildings designed for the needs of people from past centuries can be renewed to fit the needs of a contemporary world. When buildings are designed for people, they can continue to be used by people.

The 2019 PRESERVATION ACHIEVEMENT AWARD WINNERS are:

Congratulations to this year’s winners!

Boston has never needed much of an excuse to riot. Over almost four centuries, we’ve had political riots, racist and xenophobic riots, and plenty riots that seem to be about nothing at all. Of all the things Bostonians could choose to riot over, a rock and roll show might just be the most frivolous of all. And yet Boston, like many other cities, has a rich history of riots and near-riots at rock concerts. If you take enough excited young people and pack them into a tight enough space, with with enough hormones (and quite possibly booze or drugs) coursing through their veins, it doesn’t take much of a spark to set off the powderkeg. From Chuck Berry to Led Zeppelin, and from the Rolling Stones to Green Day, we’re looking into the causes and consequences of some of the most iconic melees in Boston’s rock and roll history.

Please check out the full show notes at: http://HUBhistory.com/149/

And support the show on Patreon.

Special thanks this week to Al Quint, editor of the punk zine Suburban Voice, who went into his personal archives and sent me a copy of his review of The Trouble’s last show in 1999. Thanks also to Joe Harris for emailing me his memories of the Green Day riot from the perspective of “a fourteen year old sophomore with broken glasses.”

(“Swingin Cat” at 4:35, followed by Kevin White’s appeal. Fans vs cops at 1:14:55. Demands proper behavior at 1:16:30 – 1:18:00.)

Like we’ve said on the show many times in the past, Boston has never needed much of an excuse to riot, from bread riots during the Revolutionary War to the 20th century rock riots we discussed on the show this week. Published in 2001, Boston Riots: Three Centuries of Social Violence, by Jack Tager describes some of the same incidents we’ve covered on the podcast, including 18th century Pope’s Night riots, the 1747 impressment riot, the 1834 Ursuline convent riot, the 1837 Broad Street riot, the 1919 Boston Police strike, the 1967 Grove Hall riot, and more.

The difference is that where our podcast tends to treat each of these incidents as an event unto itself, a standalone story to tell, Tager traces a few common themes that tie many of Boston’s riots together. Among the themes he identifies is the attempt to enforce or rebel against racial and societal norms in antebellum Boston, anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant sentiments in the mid and late 19th century, what Tager refers to as “ghetto” riots, and waves of antibusing sentiments. He tries to find the links between, for example, the rise of James Michael Curley’s Irish-American Democratic party machine and the Boston Police strike riots, which he in turn connects to the widespread bias against Irish immigrants at the time of Boston’s draft riots a generation or two earlier.

When he talks about the causes of violence in Roxbury in 1967 and 1968 and the white blowback against busing in the 1970s and 1980s, the language Tager uses to talk about race and gender seems dated in 2019. His attempt to uncover and connect the roots of Boston’s longstanding tendency to riot is nevertheless worth reading. I usually include a promotional blurb from the publisher describing the book, but instead here’s an angry one-star review of Boston Riots from Amazon:

Boston Riots is historically inaccurate. Professor Tager seems to think that a scuffle, fist fight, shoving match, or chanting constitutes a riot. In his book, BOSTON RIOTS, Prof. Tager is guilty of semantic manipulation as he redefines the word ‘riot’ to fit his politically correct neo-Marxist interpretation of Boston history. For example, I was personally involved in a few of the anti-forced busing demonstrations mentioned in ‘Boston Riots’ yet no riot of any kind broke out. Professor Tager writes myopically being unaffected and far away from his subject matter. He strangely omits the fact that some of the scuffles which broke out in front of my high school, South Boston High, were instigated by the Tactical Police Force (T.P.F.). It is a singular point in history that Boston has never had a riot.

Seems to have touched a nerve, eh? Somebody who personally participated in the violent protests against court ordered busing (we don’t know which ones, but many involved assaults on black schoolchildren) thinks that Tager is a neo-Marxist? And he concludes that Boston, which can be objectively shown to be one of the most riotous cities in American history, has never had a riot? If this guy hates it, you know the book must be worth reading!

The Royall House and Slave Quarters in Medford is a terrific historic site that we once featured back when we had a featured site every week. Though Massachusetts is proud of our abolitionist history, we often forget that before that sentiment arose, Massachusetts practiced slavery for about 150 years. The Royall House is the only local site I’ve been to, and perhaps the only site connected to slavery that I’ve been to anywhere, that puts the primary focus of your visit on the enslaved, rather than the enslavers.

Giving Voice is their annual benefit, where they raise a significant portion of their annual budget, as well as building community and showing off the work they do as an organization. This year’s Giving Voice will be held on September 15 at 2pm. It’s being billed as “An Afternoon with Historian Tiya Miles.” You’ll enjoy refreshments on the museum lawn, get a tour of the house, and enjoy remarks by their featured speaker. Here’s how they describe her:

Tiya Miles is a Professor of History and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at Harvard University. Recipient of a 2011 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, Professor Miles is the author of five books of history and one novel. Her most recent work, The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits, was co-winner of the prestigious 2018 Frederick Douglass Book Prize, among many other honors.

She writes, “Historians of the United States are continually unearthing an ugly truth: American slavery had no bounds. It penetrated every corner of this country, materially, economically, and ideologically, and the unjust campaign to preserve it is embedded in our built environments, North and South, East and West.”

As a fundraiser, tickets for the event range from $25 to $50. Register and purchase your tickets on the event page.

In the early 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan expanded into New England and tried to make Boston a capital of their invisible empire. However, their deep hatred for Catholics and Jews, as well as their promotion of “100% Americanism,” made the KKK a hard sell in an area where the population was growing rapidly, with a constant stream of Jewish and Catholic immigrants. After staying on the sidelines at first, Boston’s colorful mayor James Michael Curley made it his mission to drive the KKK out of Boston. After a few highly publicized Klan rallies in and around Boston, Curley began to fight them with rhetoric and questionably legal manipulation of the city permitting process.

Please check out the full show notes at: http://HUBhistory.com/148/

And support the show on Patreon.

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Our pick for the Boston Book Club this week hasn’t actually been published yet. Black Radical: the Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter is now available for pre-order, with an expected publication date of November 19. I’m taking the unusual step of recommending a pre-publication book because I’m just so darn excited for this one. My twitter friend Rayshauna Gray tweeted about it last week, which is how I learned that Kerri Greenidge had written a new biography of William Monroe Trotter, who was one of the most under-sung Black activists of the early 20th century. He made his name at the turn of the century as the radical response to Booker T Washington’s racial moderation. He published the weekly newspaper The Guardian, giving him a platform to, among other things, lead Boston’s protests against the movie Birth of a Nation, as we heard back in episode 121.

The author of the new bio, Dr. Greenidge, is a student of African American political history and radical Black political consciousness. She was a longtime historian at the Boston African American National Historic SIte, and now she teaches in Tufts University’s Consortium of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora, where she is director of the program in American studies, and where she is also codirector of the African American Trail Project.

Here’s how the Amazon pre-order page describes the book:

This long-overdue biography reestablishes William Monroe Trotter’s essential place next to Douglass, Du Bois, and King in the pantheon of American civil rights heroes. William Monroe Trotter, though still virtually unknown to the wider public, was an unlikely American hero. With the stylistic verve of a newspaperman and the unwavering fearlessness of an emancipator, he galvanized black working- class citizens to wield their political power despite the violent racism of post- Reconstruction America. For more than thirty years, the Harvard-educated Trotter edited and published the Guardian, a weekly Boston newspaper that was read across the nation. Defining himself against the gradualist politics of Booker T. Washington and the elitism of W. E. B. Du Bois, Trotter advocated for a radical vision of black liberation that prefigured leaders such as Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. Synthesizing years of archival research, historian Kerri Greenidge renders the drama of turn- of- the- century America and reclaims Trotter as a seminal figure, whose prophetic, yet ultimately tragic, life offers a link between the vision of Frederick Douglass and black radicalism in the modern era.

In case you can’t tell, I’m really looking forward to this one.

On September 7, the Museum of African American History will be hosting a panel discussion called Legacies of 1619: Recognition & Resilience. You’ve probably heard the kerfluffle surrounding the 1619 project, a special edition of the New York Times Magazine timed to coincide with the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in Virginia in 1619. The articles and related projects are intended to emphasize how central slavery is to the history of the United States.

The panel will feature David Krugler of the University of Wisconsin, Peter Wirzbicki from Princeton, and our aforementioned author, Kerri Greenidge of Tufts. It will be moderated by Robert Bellinger of Suffolk University. Here’s how the event website describes it:

The institution of slavery in English North America began in 1619 with the arrival of roughly 20 Africans in the settlement of Jamestown. What has followed has been 400 years of exploitation and discrimination in many different forms. However, telling this story is not complete without an exploration of how African American communities have created culture and institutions that have survived despite these challenges. This program will explore both structures of exploitation and forms of resistance.

The talk is a joint production of the Museum of African American History, Roxbury Community College, and the Mass Historical Society. It will be held on Saturday, September 7 at 4pm, with a reception beginning at 3:30. The event is free, but advanced registration is required.

History records that Rachel Wall was the last woman to be hanged in Massachusetts, and legend remembers her as the only woman pirate from Boston. Her highly publicized trial took place as America implemented its new constitutional government. The state attorney general who prosecuted her had been a signer of the Declaration of Independence. A few weeks after the trial, the presiding judge became one of the first US Supreme Court justices, and her defense attorney, who had helped ratify the constitution, soon became the first US Attorney for Massachusetts under the constitution. Not only that, but her death warrant carried perhaps the most famous signature in US history, that of governor John Hancock. On this week’s episode, we uncover the fascinating true story of Rachel Wall’s life, trial, and death that’s hiding within the legend.

Big thanks to our sponsor Liberty & Co. You can save 20% on their entire line of Revolutionary War inspired products when you use discount code HUBHISTORY at checkout.

Please check out the full show notes at: http://HUBhistory.com/146/

Memories of Childhood’s Slavery Days is a slim volume of memoir by Annie L Burton, published in 1909. It has an opening passage that can be off-putting for the modern reader, recalling “happy, carefree childhood days on the plantation.” However, the book isn’t the whitewashing that the first sentence indicates. Burton was enslaved on a plantation in Alabama, and her earliest memories were formed during the Civil War years. While she says that the whites were too preoccupied with the war to pay much mind to her and her playmates, Burton recalls whippings given for stealing enough food to last until the next ration day, wives being sold down the river when they didn’t produce a child within a year of their wedding day, and lynchings in the town square.

The arc of Burton’s life after the war brought her to the Boston area multiple times, and gives insight into a time of transition for formerly enslaved people in both the South and the North. In 1879, she was visiting Memphis, and she happened to read a help wanted ad placed by a white Newton family in need of a cook. She answered the ad, got hired, and on June 15, 1879 she stepped off a train in Boston’s Old Colony Station before making her way to the family’s home in Newtonville. As we’ll hear in a few minutes, the Dread Pirate Rachel Wall also spent time as a domestic servant in the Boston area, so it’s interesting to contrast their experiences, which took place about a century apart.

Burton spent about five years working in the households of the Boston area’s wealthy white residents, moving to Roxbury, Jamaica Plain, and eventually Wellesley. A death in the family took her back to the South, and after that she moved to Jacksonville, Florida for a while, where she opened a restaurant and claims to have introduced Boston Baked Beans to the Southern palate. Eventually, she found her way back to Boston and opened a restaurant here, which she says was right across from the Providence depot. The book ends abruptly in 1909, as she was getting ready to publish, when she describes opening a lodging house with her husband, but losing money on it.

It’s an amazing account by an author who remembered the experience of being enslaved, took a chance by migrating to the North, and eventually thrived as an entrepreneur in our city. The book is available as a free download on the internet archive.

On September 11, Lori Rogers-Stokes will be giving a talk called Who Were The Puritans, Who Did They Become, and What Do They Mean To Us Today? Your humble hosts have attended lectures by Dr. Rogers-Stokes about Puritan views on sex and marriage, debunking myths about the Puritans, and how the public statements of faith Puritan women made when they officially joined the church reveal their complex inner lives. We can’t think of a better local speaker to explain who the Puritans were.

The talk is part of the annual Charter Day celebration by the Partnership of Historic Bostons. The Partnership is a local group focusing on the historical relationship between Boston, Massachusetts and Boston, Lincolnshire. Charter Day is celebrated on September 7, commemorating the day in 1630 when Boston, Dorchester, and Watertown were all officially named. The partnership has a series of lectures and walking tours throughout September and October as part of their celebration. Here’s how they describe this one:

The Puritans were, in their own day, nothing—a small group with no political power, easily driven from their own land into an America dominated by other powers, both Native and European. Yet they became a lightning rod for later generations, representing all that is good and bad in the American story. We will trace who the Puritans were when they arrived here, who they became, and what they left for following generations. What did the Puritans want New England to be? What ideas did they bring with them, and what ideas did they develop as a result of their experiences here?

The talk will be held in the Rabb lecture hall at the Copley branch of the Boston Public Library. It will begin at 6pm on Wednesday, September 11. There’s no admission fee, but they do require advanced registration, and you have to have a library card.

The brilliant sunsets and dramatic weather reports inspired by smoke drifting into our area from Canadian wildfires last month got me thinking about two past HUB History shows.  There have been at least three smoke events in Boston history that caused darkness in the middle of the day and made people wonder if the end of the world was coming.  Our first clip will be about the dark days in 1780, 1881, and in 1950. Of course, people who witnessed dark days compared them to solar eclipses.  Our second classic segment is from the summer of 2017, exploring the solar eclipses that early Boston witnessed, from soon after European colonization to the turn of the 19th century. 

Please support us on Patreon and check out the full show notes at: http://HUBhistory.com/145/

Our pick for the Boston Book Club this week is a satirical map of Boston, which was created by Daniel Wallingford and published in the 1930s. It’s titled “A Bostonian’s Idea of the United States of America,” and if you’ve ever seen the famous New Yorker cover presenting “a view of the united states from 9th avenue,” you’re familiar with the genre. It pokes a bit of gentle fun at our provincialism and self-regard.

On this map of the United States, New England is as big as the rest of the country combined. The distance from Boston to Provincetown is represented as roughly equal to the distance from Boston to Saint Louis. An inset map of Boston and the wider New England area are rendered in faithful detail, while the rest of the country suffers from a hilarious level of carelessness or ignorance. Washington DC is portrayed as being basically right next to Pittsburgh, which is in turn right next to Wyoming. On the West Coast, Omaha and Denver are right between Portland and San Francisco.

Of course, since it purports to represent the Boston mindset, the whole thing is topped by a representation of a codfish. There’s a disclaimer warning readers not to use the map for navigation, astronomy, or meteorology. A note discusses what it means to be a Bostonian:

A person born in the city of BOSTON and residing in BOSTON may not be a BOSTONIAN; yet a person born in Hingham, residing in Newton (dilatory domicile: Magnolia, frequent crossings to England and the Continent), is likely to be a BOSTONIAN. The lack of a definite text-book definition for A BOSTONIAN has added to the many difficulties encountered by the Publishers of this map.

The ideas held by many BOSTONIANS concerning The UNITED STATES have been gathered, evaluated, weighted, and combined. This map, a composite of these ideas, is the result.

Hat tip to the the map-obsessed blog Bostonography, where I first learned about the Wallingford map in a 2011 article.

In 1761, slave traders kidnapped a young girl who was about seven years old from West Africa, perhaps from today’s Gambia or Senegal. She was put on the ship Phillis and brought to Boston, where she was purchased and enslaved by a man named John Wheatley, for his wife Susannah. The girl was named Phillis Wheatley after the ship that carried her and the family that enslaved her.

The Wheatley family soon recognized Phillis’ towering intellect, and provided her with an education that few enslaved people, even in “enlightened” New England, could have hoped for. She learned to read and write English quickly, then took up Latin and Greek, soon reading the classics in their original forms. She began writing poetry, and researchers have turned up evidence that she was published as early as 1767. Today, she’s remembered as the first African American to publish a volume of verse, and the first woman to do so in America. That would come later, in 1773, and still later, she would be manumitted.

However, a decade after her arrival in Boston, while she was gaining fame and respect as a poet, but was still enslaved, Phillis Wheatley became a full member of Old South Church on August 18, 1771. Now, this date is celebrated, if celebrated is the right word, as Phillis Wheatley Day at Old South Meetinghouse. The event is free with museum admission, and it will go from 9:30am to 5pm on Sunday, August 18. Stop by to meet a costumed reenactor portraying Wheatley and learn more about her remarkable life.

Sky Jockeys, Knights of the Air, and Man-Birds were just a few of the terms that newspapers around the country used to describe the early aviators who converged on Boston in September 1910. The first Harvard-Boston Aero Meet was the largest and most exciting air show that the world had ever seen, and it left Boston gripped by a bad case of aeroplane fever. Famous pilots from the US and around the world, including even Wilbur Wright, would compete for cash prizes in a number of categories, including a high-stakes race to Boston Light in the outer harbor. Tens of thousands of spectators gawked at the spectacle, reporters provided breathless coverage, and the military watched carefully to see if these newfangled flying machines could ever be useful in warfare. The event was so successful that the organizers extended it by three days beyond what was originally scheduled, then followup meets were scheduled for the next two years.

Please support us on Patreon and check out the full show notes at: http://HUBhistory.com/144/

A few months ago, we featured the book The Race Underground, by Doug Most. It details the race between Boston and New York to build the nation’s first subway system. We just discovered the PBS American Experience documentary based on the book, which was released in 2017, which is described as follows:

In the late 19th century, as America’s teeming cities grew increasingly congested, the time had come to replace the nostalgic horse-drawn trolleys with a faster, cleaner, safer, and more efficient form of transportation. Ultimately, it was Boston — a city of so many firsts — that overcame a litany of engineering challenges, the greed-driven interests of businessmen, and the great fears of its citizenry to construct America’s first subway. Based in part on Doug Most’s acclaimed book of the same name, The Race Underground tells the dramatic story of an invention that changed the lives of millions.

Love it or hate it, the T is intrinsic to the Boston experience. To give context for the film, PBS offers several interesting articles and features on related subject matter, including Benjamin M. Schmidt’s article “What the Maps Miss,” which examines how subway maps have led city dwellers to develop mental maps that are very different from geography, and it includes an overlay of a distorted T map on Google maps to illustrate his points.

The film can be viewed on Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, and the film and supporting material are available on PBS.

As you know by now, Increase and Cotton Mather cast a long shadow over the early history of Boston. Through his prolific writing, Cotton is a source for researching the religion, history, and even science of the Bay colony in the 17th and 18th centuries. On August 9, a lunchtime talk at Massachusetts Historical Society will focus on one of Cotton’s most influential religious writings, and it will be led by Dr. Jan Stievermann, who’s a professor of the history of American Christianity at Heidelberg University in Germany.

The talk is titled “Cotton Mather’s Biblia Americana 1693-1728: America’s First Bible Commentary and Storehouse of Early-Modern Learning,” and it draws on Professor Stievermann’s recent book exploring Mather’s landmark work. Here’s how the MHS describes the event:

With the ongoing edition of Cotton Mather’s massive Biblia Americana scholars of early America are now gaining access to the first comprehensive Bible commentary produced in the colonies. This talk will give an introduction to the riches of the Biblia as a source for the study of colonial New England and its place in early-modern intellectual history.

The event begins at noon on Friday. It’s free and open to the public, and pack a lunch to enjoy while Dr. Stievermann is giving his talk.