HUB History - Our Favorite Stories from Boston History

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.

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Unequal Justice in Boston (episode 182)


This week we’re revisiting two classic episodes to highlight injustice in how the death penalty has been applied in our city’s history. First, we’re going to visit early Boston, in a time when execution by hanging was a shockingly common sentence for everything from murder and piracy to witchcraft and Quakerdom. During this period, hanging was the usual, and execution by fire was decidedly unusual. This punishment was reserved only for members of one race and one sex, and in Boston’s history, only two enslaved African American women were burned at the stake. After that, we’ll fast forward to the mid-19th century, when it seemed like the death penalty would soon be abolished. After 13 years without an execution in Boston, a black sailor was convicted of first degree murder. Despite the fact that white men convicted in similar circumstances were sentenced to life in prison, he was condemned to death. And despite tens of thousands of signatures on petitions for clemency, he was hanged at Leverett Street Jail in May of 1849.

Please check out the transcript and full show notes at: http://HUBhistory.com/182/

And support the show on Patreon.

Burned at the Stake

(yes, at one point we say “1777” when we mean 1775, “architecture” when we mean architect, and we pronounce “gaol” as “gall” instead of “jail.” This episode was already exhausting enough, and we didn’t go back to fix those flubs.)

  • The Case of Maria, in the Court of Assistants in 1681, a paper presented at the Massachusetts Colonial Society in 1900. (Note: in original sources, the name of Mariah is spelled many ways, including Maria, Marja, and Mariah. We consider Mariah the most likely)
  • The Trial and Execution of Mark and Phillis in 1755, a paper published by the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1883. This paper also has useful information on the earlier case of Mariah.
  • Slavery, Freedom, and Dependence in Pre-Revolutionary Boston, 1700-1775, a 2014 dissertation with a useful description of the Diego case.
  • New England Bound, on slavery in early New England.
  • Paul Revere’s letter to Jeremy Belknap, in which he uses Mark’s gibbetted body as a landmark.
  • Ben Franklin’s World 125: Death, Suicide, & Slavery in British North America
  • A rumor of a slave uprising in British Antigua in 1736 led to 77 being executed by fire.
  • A 1741 arson conspiracy by enslaved people in New York City led to 13 being burned at the stake.
  • An enslaved man in South Carolina is sentenced to death by burning in 1830, and the practice is outlawed in 1833.
  • A 1916 lynching in Waco, Texas in which a black man was beaten, castrated, chained to a tree, doused in kerosene, and burned alive.
Washington Goode
  • Governor Edward Everett’s 1836 address, in which he seems to allude to the possibility of abolishing the death penalty.
  • An issue of The Prisoner’s Friend, a journal dedicated to penal reform and abolishing the death penalty, dedicated largely to the Goode case.
  • An 1849 edition of the Boston Pilot that criticizes the death penalty and Goode’s execution.
  • Coverage in William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator of Goode’s suicide attempt and execution.
  • A collection of petitions against the execution of Washington Goode.
  • An article about the Concord petition in the journal Concord Saunterer.
  • Data on capital punishment in the US that we used to calculate the decrease in executions from 1801 to 1845, then the rise again after 1845.
Boston Book Club

Kevin Lynch studied architecture with Frank Lloyd Wright, trained at Yale, Rensselaer, and MIT, and served with the US Army Corps of Engineers, then spent 30 years as a professor of urban planning at MIT. During this long career, he how people perceive the cities that surround them and became a proponent of mental mapping. His 1960 book The Image of the City is his most famous work, resulting from a five year study of how people form mental maps of urban environments. He concluded that most people imagine their cities in predictable ways, and their mental maps are composed of elements Lynch called paths, nodes, districts, landmarks, and edges.

Of course, to study people’s mental maps of Boston, Lynch had to transform them into physical maps. He usually did this by having his participants sketch out their mental maps, and sometimes by sketching out what they described to him verbally. He would then compare the resulting maps or combine many of them into a consensus view of a city or district. To me, these resulting maps are the most delightful part of this book. The book was written in an era before widespread computer graphics, and Lynch had trained as an architect, so the book is packed with neat, hand drawn maps that are marked up with handy notation and clear explanations in Lynch’s perfect architect’s handwriting.

Whether these sketches were showing how the docks and warehouses of Boston’s waterfront, then a much more active commercial port, prevented most Bostonians from experiencing the harbor, or showing how people first envision open spaces and prominent landmarks when describing their cities, these maps are gems. Even if you don’t pick up the book, the MIT library holds a collection of his drawings that are viewable online.

Upcoming Event

And for our upcoming event this week, we’re featuring a virtual book talk from the Massachusetts Historical Society. Abram Van Engen of Washington University in St Louis will be discussing his book City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism. Here’s how the MHS describes the event:

Abram Van Engen shows how the phrase “City on a hill,” from a 1630 sermon by Massachusetts Bay governor John Winthrop, shaped the story of American exceptionalism in the 20th century. By tracing the strange history of Winthrop’s speech, from total obscurity in its own day to pervasive use in modern politics, Van Engen reveals the way national stories take shape and shows us how those tales continue to influence competing visions of the country—the many different meanings of America that emerge from a preservation of its literary past.

The event is free, but to avoid zoom-bombing, you’ll have to register in advance to get a link to the virtual meeting.


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 April 27, 2020  1h7m