Episodes

  • The Lioness of Boston, with Emily Franklin

    The Lioness of Boston, with Emily Franklin
    Sep 10 2023
    Isabella Stewart Gardner was a consummate collector, generous philanthropist, and rabid Red Sox fan.  Today, she’s best known as the namesake of an art museum in Boston’s Fenway neighborhood (and if we’re being honest, the museum is probably best known for a famous 1990 heist).  This week, Jake interviews author Emily Franklin, whose new novel The Lioness of Boston explores the person behind the Gardner fortune.  They discuss the great romance, tragedy, and scandal of Isabella’s life, the different personas she tried on throughout different eras of her life, and her obsession with the idea of a legacy.  Emily will tell us why Boston at first turned up its nose at wealthy young Isabella, but later came to embrace the flamboyant and eccentric Mrs Jack as one of our most colorful and generous characters. Emily will also describe what makes historical fiction different from biography, and the freedom and limitations that the genre brings.   Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/283/ Support us: http://patreon.com/HUBhistory/
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    51 mins
  • Disasters and Disaster Relief (episode 282)

    Disasters and Disaster Relief (episode 282)
    Aug 27 2023
    Enjoy two classic stories this week. First up is the story of the Cocoanut Grove fire. In November 1942, Boston was on a wartime footing, business was booming, and the streets were packed with soldiers and sailors on their way to fronts around the world. On the Saturday after Thanksgiving, a fire broke out at the popular Cocoanut Grove nightclub, and in the moments that followed, 492 people were killed, making it Boston’s most deadly disaster. After that, the podcast visits December 1917, when another world war raged in Europe. When confusing reports of a disaster to the north reached Boston, the city sprang into action, loading a special train with doctors, nurses, and medical supplies. After the most massive explosion before the advent of the atom bomb, Boston rushed relief to the town of Halifax. In return, they send us a Christmas tree each year. Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/282/ Support us: http://patreon.com/HUBhistory/ Maui relief: https://www.mauinuistrong.info/support/
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    1 hr and 6 mins
  • JFK and PT-109, 80 years later

    JFK and PT-109, 80 years later
    Aug 13 2023
    80 years ago this month, on a tiny Pacific island, a legend was born. In the darkness before dawn on August 2, 1943, a Japanese destroyer rammed and sank a small, plywood boat commanded by a 26 year old Lieutenant Junior Grade named John Fitzgerald Kennedy. In the hours and days that followed, young Jack Kennedy would prove to be a true American hero, swimming mile after mile through shark and crocodile infested waters, while towing an injured crew member by a strap clenched in his teeth. In the ensuing decades, PT-109 has become one of the most famous small craft in US Navy history, largely due to Kennedy’s actions. However, it also became a craven political ploy, when JFK and his father Joseph Kennedy used the story of PT-109 to launch a political career that would carry Jack Kennedy to the Oval Office. Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/281/ Support us: http://patreon.com/HUBhistory/
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    56 mins
  • Bostonians on the Pacific

    Bostonians on the Pacific
    Jul 30 2023
    This week, enjoy three classic stories about Bostonians and their adventures on the Pacific Ocean. First, we’ll hear about the voyages of the Columbia to the Pacific Northwest starting in 1787, then we’ll move on to the Congregational missionaries who descended on Hawaii in 1823, and finally, we’ll talk about the Boston whaler who brought the industrial revolution to Spanish California. While you’re listening to these three classic stories, see if you can figure out what I’m working on that would involve a Brookline native on a small boat in the Solomon Islands in August 1943! Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/280/ Support us: http://patreon.com/HUBhistory/
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    2 hrs and 44 mins
  • Granite, Glass, and the Construction of King’s Chapel

    Granite, Glass, and the Construction of King’s Chapel
    Jul 16 2023
    This week's story ties one of modern Boston’s iconic Freedom Trail sites to the earliest days of English settlement in the Shawmut Peninsula. It’s a story that ties the first Puritan to die in Boston to the hated Royal governor Edmund Andros, and it ties some of the earliest non-English immigrants in Boston to Ben Franklin and Abigail Adams through the invention of two local industries. King’s Chapel is beloved in Boston today, but it was seen as an unwelcome invasion when it was first proposed in 1686. In this week’s show, we’ll look at how Boston found room for an unwanted church, how the church was reinvented three times, and how it launched local glassmaking and founded the granite industry in Quincy. We’ll also see where you can still find the last traces of the original, wooden King’s Chapel hiding inside the walls of a more modern church, but not here in Boston. Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/279/ Support us: http://patreon.com/HUBhistory/
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    50 mins
  • The Adamses Declare Independence

    The Adamses Declare Independence
    Jul 2 2023
    Between the John Adams miniseries on HBO and the musical 1776, everyone knows that John Adams was one of the leading voices for independence in the Continental Congress. And along with negotiating the treaty of Paris and keeping the US out of the Quasi War, Adams always considered the Declaration one of his chief accomplishments. 50 years after Congress adopted it, John Adams remembered it on the morning of July 4, 1826, remarking “it is a great day. It is a good day.” That evening, he died, with many sources reporting that his last words were “Jefferson still lives.” He was wrong, though. Earlier that day, Jefferson had woken briefly, asked “is it the fourth” and then declined further medical treatment before slipping into a coma and himself dying. For someone who was so closely associated with America’s founding document, why did John Adams believe we should celebrate it on July 2nd? And how did his closest and most trusted advisor, his wife Abigail, urge him on toward independence in a letter that history remembers for other reasons? Let’s find out! Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/278/ Support us: http://patreon.com/HUBhistory/
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    28 mins
  • Thomas Jefferson in Boston

    Thomas Jefferson in Boston
    Jun 18 2023
    Thomas Jefferson visited Boston in 1784, arriving in town on June 18th. That also happened to be the same day when Abigail Adams left her home in Quincy to start making her way to France to join John at his diplomatic posting, though her ship didn’t actually leave Boston until the next day. In this episode, we’ll explore how the friendship that was kindled during their single day together in Boston carried on through their shared months in France, their decades of correspondence, and even through the years when Jefferson and John Adams were feuding. We’ll also examine Thomas Jefferson as an early New England tourist, who explored not only Boston, but also New Haven, Portsmouth, and other key regional population centers, as well as taking a fun look at his epic Boston shopping spree just days before he too boarded a boat to Europe. Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/277/ Support us: http://patreon.com/HUBhistory/
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    43 mins
  • Revolution's Edge, with Patrick Gabridge and Nikki Stewart

    Revolution's Edge, with Patrick Gabridge and Nikki Stewart
    Jun 4 2023
    The new play “Revolution’s Edge” will debut at Old North Church in June 2023. It tells the story of three Bostonians and their families on the eve of the Revolution. Mather Byles is the Loyalist rector of Old North Church, Cato is an African American man who’s enslaved by Byles, and John Pulling is a whiggish ship’s captain and member of the Old North vestry. The three men have very different stations in life, but they all have young families with intertwined lives, and on April 18, 1775, they all had very different decisions to make about those lives. My guests this week are Patrick Gabridge, producing artistic director of the Plays in Place theater company, and Nikki Stewart, executive director of Old North Illuminated. Together, they’ll tell us how this, um, revolutionary new drama came to be. Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/276/ Support us: http://patreon.com/HUBhistory/
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    44 mins