The Boston slave trade began when a ship arrived in the harbor in the summer of 1638 carrying a cargo of enslaved Africans, but there was already a history of slave ownership in the new colony. After this early experience, Massachusetts would continue to be a slave owning colony for almost 150 years. In this week’s episode, we discuss the origins of African slavery in Massachusetts and compare the experience of enslaved Africans to other forms of unfree labor in Boston, such as enslaved Native Americans, Scottish prisoners of war, and indentured servants.

Warning: This week’s episode uses some of the racialized language of our 17th and 18th century sources, and it describes an act of sexual violence.

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This week we’re revisiting Boston’s great Molasses Flood, the subject of one of our earliest podcasts. We’re giving you an update, now that our technology, research, and storytelling skills have improved. Stay tuned for tales of rum, anarchists, and the speed of molasses in January. It’s not slow!

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The Boston Women’s Municipal League was a civic organization made up of mostly middle and upper class women, at a time when most women didn’t work outside the home.  In 1915, they declared war on rats.  Over the next few years, Women's Municipal League published literature on eradicating rats, carried out an extensive education campaign, and in 1917 hosted a city-wide Rat Day with cash prizes for the citizens who killed the most rats.  

Show notes: HUBhistory.com/072

In 1848, railroad worker Phineas Gage suffered an unusual injury, in which a three foot tamping iron was blown through his skull, making him on of the greatest medical curiosities of all time. We’ll discuss his time in Boston, his life post-injury, and the impact of his case on modern neuroscience.

Content warning: The details of Gage’s accident and injury are a little gory.

Show notes: HUBhistory.com/071

This week, Ryan Walsh joins us to discuss Boston in 1968, the James Brown concert that might have prevented a riot, a cult that took over Roxbury’s Fort Hill, the strange history of LSD in our city, and a musical movement called the Bosstown Sound.  Most of all, though, we will discuss his book Astral Weeks, a Secret History of 1968 and the Van Morrison record that inspired it.

Show notes: HUBhistory.com/070

We’re joined this week by Lauren Prescott, the executive director of the South End Historical Society and author of a new book simply titled "Boston’s South End." It’s part of Arcadia Publishing’s “Postcard History Series,” and it features hundreds of images from the South End Historical Society’s collection of historic postcards dating from the 1860s to the mid 20th century.

Show notes: HUBhistory.com/069

In 1848, a murder case nearly brought an end to the death penalty in Massachusetts. When a young black man named Washington Goode was convicted of first degree murder that year, there hadn’t been an execution in Boston for 13 years. White men who had been convicted of the same crime had their sentences commuted to a life in prison, and tens of thousands of petitions poured in asking the governor to do the same thing for Goode. Yet even so, he was sent to the gallows. Why?

Show notes: HUBhistory.com/068

We used our studio time this week to record something special that will air next month. Without a new episode, we didn’t want to leave you without any HUB History this week. Instead, here are three classic episodes honoring black and white abolitionists in 19th Century Boston. Recorded last February, in the wake of President Trump’s attempt to implement a “Muslim Ban,” these episodes focus on Boston’s resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act, which was seen as an unjust law.

Show notes: HUBhistory.com/067

This week, we’re talking about the conflict between Puritans and pirates in the late 1600s and early 1700s. Cotton Mather is remembered for his role in the Salem Witch Trials, but he was the childhood minister to Ben Franklin, ultimate symbol of the American Enlightenment, and he died less than fifty years before our Declaration of Independence was signed. In a way, Mather was one of the last Puritans, and some of his most famous sermons are the ones he wrote for mass executions of pirates. Times were changing, setting up a conflict between rigidly hierarchical Puritan societies and fledgling democracies that could be found on board pirate ships.

Show notes: HUBhistory.com/066

For almost two years in the early 1960s, women in Boston lived in fear of a killer who became known as the Boston Strangler. Thirteen women were killed, and the murders were eventually attributed to Albert DeSalvo, based on his confession, details revealed in court during a separate case, and DNA evidence linking him to the last murder victim. It’s been over fifty years since DeSalvo was imprisoned on unrelated charges, leaving many people to question whether he was really the lone killer.

Show notes: HUBhistory.com/065