Massachusetts Historical Society Podcasts

The Confederacy in history, myth, and memory continues to be a topic that fascinates a global audience. Waite Rawls, President and CEO of the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, demonstrates how this history is relevant in the 21st century, especially its complications and nuances.

Listen to this talk.

Gene Dattel, author of Cotton and Race in the Making of America, brings the relationship of cotton and race out of the regional shadows into the forefront of American history. The powerful dynamic of cotton, the first truly global business, produced catastrophic racial consequences and performed a critical nation-building economic impact. Dattel casts light upon today’s economic and racial issues and financial policies and explains why the antebellum North provides the key to the tragedy of African American history from Reconstruction to the present.

Listen to this talk.

One of the most significant urban developments of the 1950s and 60s, the Prudential Center anchors the Boston skyline with its tall gray tower. It is also a beacon of a mid-century moment when insurance companies like Prudential deployed buildings in cities to symbolize and advertise their intangible product: financial security. Yale architectural historian Elihu Rubin tells the full story of "The Pru," placing it in its political, economic, and architectural contexts and providing new insights into urban renewal in postwar America. Listen to the lecture.

Hoping to sidestep popular elections and transcend politics, the framers concocted a bizarre, untried method of selecting the president. Little did they suspect how their system would be gamed, from 1789 through 2012. Ray Raphael’s latest book is Mr. President: How and Why the Founders Created a Chief Executive (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012). Listen to the talk with an introduction by MHS Trustee and William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of American History at MIT Pauline Maier.

Hugh Howard, author of Dr. Kimball and Mr. Jefferson: Rediscovering the Founding Fathers of American Architecture, discusses Fiske Kimball, the pioneering writer, scholar, and museum director who recovered Thomas Jefferson's architectural genius from historical memory. Listen to this lecture.

Jack Larkin, Clark University & Old Sturbridge Village

Jack Larkin is Affiliate Professor of History at Clark University and Chief Historian Emeritus at Old Sturbridge Village, the outdoor museum of early American history. He has also written The Reshaping of Everyday Life 1790-1840, and Where We Lived: Discovering the Places We Once Called Home, The American Home 1775-1840.

Listen to this lecture

With Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), Phillis Wheatley (1753?-1784) became the first English-speaking person of African descent to publish a book and only the second woman--of any race or background--to do so in America. Written in Boston while she was just a teenager, and when she was still a slave, Wheatley's work was an international sensation. Listen to the lecture.

In the early twentieth century, the Boston Red Sox rode major league baseball like a colossus, capturing four World Series titles in seven seasons. Blessed with legendary players like Babe Ruth, Tris Speaker, Harry Hooper, and Smokey Joe Wood, and a brand new, thoroughly modern stadium, the Red Sox reigned as kings of the Deadball Era.

Listen to the lecture.