HUB History - Our Favorite Stories from Boston History

In lieu of a brand new story, this week we are sharing two classic tales from the earliest years of Puritan Boston. One of them might be considered comedy, while the other is high drama. First, we’ll visit the diaries of Boston founder John Winthrop and find two accounts of unexplained lights in the sky and other phenomena that might have been the first UFO sightings in Boston. After that, we’ll fast forward to the era of the English Civil Wars, when two men who had signed the death warrant for a king decided that Boston was the only safe refuge from his heir’s assassins.

Please check out the transcript and full show notes at: http://HUBhistory.com/164/

And support the show on Patreon. Puritan UFOs

• John Winthrop’s notes on the 1639 sighting
• Winthrop’s account of the 1644 event
• Drake’s History and Antiquities expands on the 1644 event
• UFO hunters get lost in the Blue Hills in 2017

• Royal Governor Thomas Hutchinson’s account of Whalley and Goffe, drawn from Goffe’s diary and letters.
• Reverend Ezra Stiles’ account of Whalley and Goffe, based on Hutchinson’s work, plus interrogation of local Connecticut folklore.
• Charles II offers a reward for the capture of Whalley and Goffe (transcript)
• “The Gray Champion,” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, from Twice-Told Tales.

• “In Defense of Regicide: John Cotton on the Execution of Charles I,” by Francis J. Bremer, The William and Mary Quarterly, January 1980
• “Thomas Hutchinson, Ezra Stiles, and the Legend of the Regicides,” by Mark L. Sargent, The William and Mary Quarterly, July 1992
• “Review: Regicides on the Run,” by Matthew Jenkinson, Huntington Library Quarterly, Summer 2013

• “The Regicides In New England,” by Frederick Hull Cogswell, New England Magazine, October 1893
• “The Hunt for the Regicides,” by Alexander Winston, American Heritage, December 1964
• “King Killers in America (and the American Who Avenged the King),” by Michael Walsh and Don Jordan, excerpted from The King’s Revenge: Charles II and the Greatest Manhunt in British History, August 2016
• For more on the 1689 uprising against Sir Edmund Andros in Boston, check out HUB History Episode 6.

Our header image is the death warrant for King Charles I. See the signatures of Whalley (far left) and Goffe (center) highlighted below.

Our pick for the Boston Book Club this week is a recent episode of the podcast In episode 267 of the podcast Ben Franklin’s World, host Liz Covart interviews Thomas Wickman, the author of a book called Snowshoe Country: An Environmental and Cultural History of Winter in the Early Northeast. Set mostly in the 17th and early 18th century, the book outlines what winter was like at that time, and how the residents of New England, both Native and English, experienced it. While it obviously covers a much wider geography than just Boston, Boston does play a part.

Wickman shares stories of violent winter storms where the tides rose so quickly around Boston’s wharves that the ice pack heaved and damaged the piers. There were stories of three Native Americans who died of hypothermia on Boston Neck after getting caught in an unexpected storm. And even the stories that range farther afield tell us more about early New England, and early Boston. Learn how Native Americans used specialized snowshoes to thrive in their winter hunting grounds, and how English settlers later adopted the same technology to send military patrols into those same hunting grounds, disrupting Native food sources.

Our friends at Boston By Foot have partnered with both Sam Adams and Democracy Brewing to create Tastings and Tales, a whole series of historically inspired beer tastings. They have one tasting planned with each brewery in the months of January, February, and March. If you’re as bad at math as I am, that’s a total of six tastings. The historical subjects for each event span a wide range. At Sam Adams, you will hear about the early history of beer in Boston in January; then fun historical tales in February, including Faneuil Hall’s golden grasshopper weather vane, the state’s sacred cod, and more; and then finally in March the topic will be the remarkable women of Jamaica Plain.

Over at Democracy Brewing, the first tasting will be structured around the stories that inspired the names of their beers, including James Michael Curley, pullman porters, and labor organizers; February will bring tales of community solidarity; and the topic in March will be radical women like Lucy Stone and Melnea Cass, not too different from what’s happening over at Sam Adams. All the events at Democracy will begin at 2pm on Sundays, while the Sam Adams tastings will be held at 6pm on Mondays. Each tasting will be $20, and they are, obviously, 21+.