HUB History - Our Favorite Stories from Boston History

Mar 09 2025 342 ep. 47 mins 736

HUB History - Our Favorite Stories from Boston History Podcast artwork

Where two history buffs go far beyond the Freedom Trail to share our favorite stories from the history of Boston, the hub of the universe.

Society & Culture History

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Water for Boston, part 3 – Lost Towns of the Swift River Valley: Drowned by the Quabbin, with Elena Palladino

Mar 09 2025 57 mins

This week, we're speaking with Elena Palladino, the author of the recent book Lost Towns of the Swift River Valley: Drowned by the Quabbin. This book outlines the 20th century development of Boston’s modern water supply system through the eyes of the residents of the four towns in north central Massachusetts that were sacrificed to create the Quabbin reservoir: Greenwich, Enfield

Drinker, Draftsman, Soldier, Spy

Feb 23 2025 58 mins

250 years ago this week, General Thomas Gage, the royal governor of Massachusetts and commander in chief of all British forces in North America, sent two British spies into the rural communities around Boston. He carefully selected two redcoats to go undercover, roaming highways and country lanes and taking painstaking notes about their terrain and relative military advantages. Fir

Martin Luther King’s Boston, with Dr. Imari Paris Jeffries

Feb 09 2025 49 mins

This week, Dr. Imari Paris Jeffries joins us to talk about the years when Martin Luther King, Jr lived in Boston. As you’ll hear him say in just a few minutes, Dr. King is a figure that most of us only imagine as a grainy newsreel image or a voice crackling on an old recording, so it can be hard to imagine Dr. King as flesh and blood. With Dr. Paris Jeffries help, we’re going t

The Silenced Muse: Emily Hale, T.S. Eliot, and the Role of a Lifetime, with Sara Fitzgerald

Jan 26 2025 87 mins

In this episode, Sara Fitzgerald joins us to discuss her new book The Silenced Muse: Emily Hale, T.S. Eliot, and the Role of a Lifetime. It is the first book-length biography of Emily Hale, the longtime love and secret creative muse of poet T.S. Eliot, who wrote Emily Hale over 1100 letters over the decades of their complicated relationship. However, their relationship was mostly f

Beastly Boston

Jan 12 2025 57 mins

Lions and tigers and bears, oh my! This week, we’re talking about Boston’s first encounters with exotic animals. I will be talking about the very first lion to make an appearance in Boston, but instead of tigers and bears, we’ll take a look at Boston’s experiences with elephants and alligators. Our story will span almost 200 years, with the first lion being imported in the

Boston Pre- and Post-Roe

Dec 29 2024 52 mins

Thirty years ago this week, Brookline became the site of the most deadly anti-abortion violence in American history, at least up to that point. Sadly, right wing extremists and religious terrorists have since eclipsed the bloodshed on Beacon Street on December 30, 1994. On that day, two women’s health clinics were targeted by a radical with a gun because, along with pap smears, b

Christmas 3: The Original War on Christmas

Dec 25 2024 56 mins

For our third Christmas episode, we’re setting our clocks back to the year 1659. If you’d been alive in Boston back then, you would want to keep your Christmas celebration under wraps, because that was the year when Puritan Boston banned Christmas. Now, that may not fit with your mental image of the Puritans as a deeply religious group, but that’s exactly why they literally e

Christmas 2: The Christmas Eve Execution

Dec 24 2024 38 mins

Today's Christmas bonus is anything but merry. In the depths of the British occupation of Boston in 1774, British Private William Ferguson played hooky on a December day, got really drunk while his unit was on a routine patrol, and then he either tried to desert and start a new life here in America, or he went to see about getting some laundry done. Either way, he was convicted of

Christmas 1: The Halifax Tree

Dec 23 2024 34 mins

This week, I'm sharing three past episodes to keep you warm on your Christmas travels. For the first one, let’s set the clock back to December 1917, when an ammunition ship blew up in the harbor of Halifax, Nova Scotia, causing the largest explosion before the invention of the atom bomb. The blast left thousands dead, injured, or homeless, in the teeth of a Canadian winter. 500 m

The First American Christmas Cards

Dec 15 2024 42 mins

Have you ever wondered where the tradition of sending Christmas cards every year came from? While the first Christmas cards appeared in Britain back in the 1840s, it was a German immigrant named Louis Prang who made them popular in the United States and around the world. Using a revolutionary new color printing technique that he called chromolithography, Prang’s Roxbury factory m