HUB History - Our Favorite Stories from Boston History

For Pride Month, we're dropping some of our favorite past episodes back into the podcast feed every Wednesday this month. Enjoy! The November 18, 2003 decision in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health guaranteed marriage rights to same-sex couples in Massachusetts. The decision was the first by a U.S. state’s highest court to find that same-sex couples had the right to marry, and it was grounded in the language of equal justice that John Adams wrote into our state constitution. Despite numerous attempts to delay the ruling, and to reverse it, the first marriage licenses were issued to same-sex couples on May 17, 2004. Full show notes: http://www.hubhistory.com/episodes/love-is-love-john-adams-and-marriage-equality-episode-134/

In the last decade of the 18th century, a group of investors called the Proprietors of the Middlesex Canal turned a crazy idea into reality. After some initial stumbles, they were able to successfully build a navigational canal from Boston Harbor to the Merrimack River in Lowell. In an era before highways and airports, it became the first practical freight link between the markets and wharves of Boston and the vast interior of New England in Central Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Against all odds, it was a success, and an unparalleled feat of engineering. However, its perceived success was short lived, with the coming of the railroad spelling doom for the canal business and commercial failure for the Proprietors. Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/225/ Support us: http://patreon.com/HUBhistory/

For Pride Month, we're dropping some of our favorite past episodes back into the podcast feed every Wednesday this month. Enjoy! A new form of relationship known as "Boston Marriages" arose between 19th century women, which had all the emotional trappings of romantic love, but was long considered to be merely an intense form of friendship. More recently, however, critics have wondered whether Victorian assumptions about the inherent chasteness of womankind allowed couples who would consider themselves lesbians today to hide in plain sight. Full show notes: http://www.hubhistory.com/episodes/boston-marriages-in-literature-and-life-episode-136/

For Pride Month, we're dropping some of our favorite past episodes back into the podcast feed every Wednesday this month. Enjoy! Emma Snodgrass defied the gender roles of the 1850s, getting arrested multiple times in Boston for appearing in public unchaperoned and dressed as a man. Was she a troublemaker looking for thrills? Was she trying to pass as a man in order to find work and independence in a society with few opportunities for women? Or was she a trans person in an era that didn’t yet have words to describe that concept? Unfortunately, the historic record leaves us with just as many questions as answers. Full show notes: http://www.hubhistory.com/episodes/the-girl-in-pantaloons-episode-105/

On June 10, 1768 a riot swept through Boston that forced Royal officials to flee for their lives, saw a boat bodily carried onto the Common and burned, and in the end helped bring on the Boston Massacre less than two years later. John Hancock, later a prominent patriot and owner of America’s most famous signature, was at the center of the controversy. Known then as a leading merchant and possibly the richest man in the British colonies, Hancock would find himself on trial as a smuggler before a court that was originally set up to deal with pirates and defended by none other than future President John Adams. Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/224/ Support the show: http://patreon.com/HUBhistory/

For Pride Month, we're dropping some of our favorite past episodes back into the podcast feed every Wednesday this month. Enjoy! In this episode, Dr. Russ Lopez discusses his recent book, The Hub of the Gay Universe: An LGBTQ History of Boston, Provincetown, and Beyond. Russ and I talked about Puritan attitudes toward sin and sodomy, the late 19th century golden age for LGBTQ Boston, the tragic toll of the AIDS crisis, and the long fight for marriage equality. Full show notes: http://www.hubhistory.com/episodes/the-hub-of-the-gay-universe-with-russ-lopez-episode-167/

When Starr Faithfull’s body washed up on a Long Island beach 90 years ago, the case became a national obsession. At the center of the story was a beautiful young flapper, with a diary full of covert sexual conquests, a sordid history with a prominent politician, and a drug and booze fueled nightlife in the speakeasies of two major cities. Was her death a suicide, driven by her dark past? A tragic accident after one too many? Or was it something darker, a murder for hire on behalf of a former Boston mayor… or his underworld adversaries? Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/223/ Support us: http://patreon.com/HUBhistory/

At the outbreak of World War II, president Roosevelt decided to create a single centralized agency to organize the nation’s many competing intelligence services. Not the CIA, which would come a few years later, but the Office of Strategic Services. Before the CIA, the OSS was America’s chief spy service. And before Julia Child was a famous chef on PBS, young Julia McWilliams was recruited by the OSS, where she traveled the world and fell in love with Paul Child and exotic food. Listen to this week’s episode to learn about Julia Child at war: how she was recruited and trained, where she served in the Asian theater of war, and why that experience helped lead her to a Cambridge house with its now famous kitchen. Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/222/ Support us: http://patreon.com/HUBhistory

On May Day in 1919, Roxbury socialists marched in support of a textile workers' strike in Lawrence.  The afternoon turned violent, with police firing shots to disperse the crowd.  In the aftermath, two officers were killed and a mob formed that hunted down and viciously beat many of the marchers.  As the smoke cleared, it became evident that one of the leaders of the march was a celebrity: William James Sidis, the boy wonder. Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/221 Support us: http://patreon.com/HUBhistory

In the 1820s, waves of Christian missionaries were dispatched from Boston, believing they might never return. They didn’t know much about the land they were going to settle in or the people they were trying to convert, but what little they had heard was frightening. The missionaries came from a church that was directly descended from the harsh Christianity of the Puritans, and they were on their way to a land where the people worshipped a pantheon of many gods. From a society where both men and women were basically always covered from neck to ankles, they were going to a land where the people wore tattoos and very little else. They had heard rumors of graven idols and human sacrifice, and believed they were on their way to do battle with the devil himself. Many of them believed that they were being sent into the gates of hell, but they were on their way to heaven on earth itself… the Kingdom of Hawaii. Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/220/ Support us: http://patreon.com/HUBhistory/

During the Kennedy administration, a group of Boston businessmen led by a millionaire dairy farmer hatched an audacious plan. They proposed building an experimental city of the future on made land, piers, and floating platforms connecting Columbia Point in Dorchester with Thompson Island in Boston Harbor. This new city would be the site of a World’s Fair timed to celebrate America’s Bicentennial, and the site would then be reused to solve all of Boston’s problems with housing, race relations, environmental damage, and economic decline. Spoiler alert: We don’t have a futuristic city connecting Columbia Point with the Harbor Islands. But the story of how a plan ripped straight out of science fiction almost came to be built in Boston reveals a lot about an optimistic city torn apart by the busing crisis.

March 14 is the anniversary of one of the worst railroad accidents that ever happened in Massachusetts. On March 14, 1887, a train filled with suburban commuters was on its way from Dedham to Park Square station in Boston, stopping in West Roxbury and Roslindale along the way. Moments before it would have passed through Forest Hills, disaster struck. By the time the engineer turned around, he saw a cloud of dust and a pile of twisted rubble where nine passenger cars should have been. In a split second, a normal morning commute was transformed into a nightmare of death and dismemberment for hundreds of passengers. Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/218 Support us: http://patreon.com/HUBhistory

Professor Richard T Greener grew up in Boston in the shadow of the abolition movement, graduated from Harvard, and became one of the foremost Black intellectuals of his era. However, soon after publishing his most influential work, when it seemed like he would take up the mantle of Frederick Douglass, he instead sank into obscurity. He was nearly forgotten for over a century, until his legacy was rediscovered in 2009 in a discarded steamer trunk in a dusty attic on the South Side of Chicago. Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/217 Support us: http://patreon.com/HUBhistory

For Black History Month, we're dropping some of our favorite past episodes back into the podcast feed every few days this month. Enjoy! David Walker was one of America’s first radical abolitionists, a free African American man who moved to Boston in 1824 to escape the danger and humiliations of life in the slave states. He became a prominent member of Black society in Boston before writing and distributing An Appeal to the Colored People of the World. This radical work called for the immediate abolition of slavery, and even advocated violence against whites to bring about emancipation. At the time, few white leaders were talking openly about ending slavery, and those who were favored gradual emancipation. Frederick Douglass would later say that the book “startled the land like a trump of coming judgement,” and it shook the slaveowning society of the white South to the core. Show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/117

For Black History Month, we're dropping some of our favorite past episodes back into the podcast feed every few days this month. Enjoy! 50 years ago this week, residents of one Boston neighborhood carried out an act of civil disobedience, bringing attention to the city’s need for affordable housing. A group of mostly African American residents occupied an empty lot where rowhouses once stood. It was Boston’s 1968 Tent City protest, and it helped change how the city approaches development and urban planning. Show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/077