HUB History - Our Favorite Stories from Boston History

Levi Ames was a notorious thief who plagued the Boston area in the years just before the Revolutionary War began. He stole everything from shirts to silver plate, crisscrossing New England, until he finally got caught right here in Boston. Tune in to learn about his criminal background, his supposed jailhouse religious conversion, and the desperate race between some of the most prominent Bostonians to steal his body after his execution.

Please check out the transcript and full show notes at: http://HUBhistory.com/187/

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• Two broadsides portraying Ames’ execution
• Samuel Mather’s execution sermon, including the “Life, Last Words, and Dying Speech of Levi Ames,” starting on page 31.
• Samuel Stillman’s execution sermon, including his firsthand account of Ames’ last days and execution starting on page 27.
• An overview of the Ebenezer Richardson case from the editors of the Adams Papers.
• Merchant John Rowe records the throngs of onlookers at the execution.
• A five part overview of the Ames case.
• Another overview of the Ames case.
• JL Bell identifies Groton as the final resting place of Levi Ames.
• Biography of John Warren written by Edward Warren.
• 1831 Massachusetts Anatomy Act.
• The Legal Status of Anatomy in Massachusetts Before 1800

• The “pirate” Rachel Wall is sentenced to involuntary indenture, then death
• Nat Sheidley of Revolutionary Spaces tells us about the death of Christopher Seider
• John Collins Warren and the 19th century Spunkers
• More about execution sermons and the Mather family

Our pick for the Boston Book Club this week is Chain of Change: Struggles for Black Community Development, by Mel King. Published in 1981, hard on the heels of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement and as Boston was just barely coming out the other side of the busing crisis, Chain of Change looks both backwards and forwards. It’s a comprehensive record of Black Boston’s struggles in the decade roughly bracketed between 1958 and 1968, it’s a call to action for the 1980s, and it’s a personal history of Mel King himself. Now 93 years old, Mel King was the child of immigrants from the West Indies. He grew up in Boston reading William Monroe Trotter’s Boston Guardian and attending the Church of All Nations. In a long career as an activist, he worked on streetcorners trying to keep kids from joining gangs, as a community organizer, teacher, and finally as a state representative for the South End and Lower Roxbury.

We’ve used the book as a source several times in the past, especially for episode 77, about the Tent City protests that he organized, and for episode 140, about the police riot in Grove Hall in 1967. Mel’s wife Joyce is also a formidable activist and organizer in her own right. They have been married for almost 70 years now.

William Bradford signed the Mayflower compact, helped found Plymouth colony, and served as its governor for much of its first three decades. During those decades, he wrote a journal known as Of Plimoth Plantation that covers the history of the Pilgrim Separatists as they fled England for the Netherlands in 1608, then emigrated to the shores of New England in 1620.

In honor of the 400th anniversary of the Pilgrim settlement in Massachusetts, Dr. Francis J Bremer of New England Beginnings created a new edition of the journal, published by the New England Historical Genealogical Society and the Colonial Society of Massachusetts. This Thursday, June 11 at 2pm, he and fellow editor Ken Minkema of Yale Divinity School will host an online seminar about Bradford, Plymouth, and what it took to create this landmark work. If you want to join the free online event, just make sure to register in advance to get the zoom meeting details.