HUB History - Our Favorite Stories from Boston History

HUB History loves the Boston Marathon almost as much as we love Boston history. Patriots Day is one of Nikki’s favorite days of the year, and Jake has run Boston for charity. Just days before the BAA announced that the 124th Boston Marathon would hav ...

245 years ago this week, provincial militia and royal marines battled it out in what is now East Boston. The battle of Chelsea Creek was sandwiched between the battle of Lexington in April and Bunker Hill in June, and it’s often overshadowed by the ...

In the 1860s, Bostonians could pay 20 cents and watch a captive whale swim in a custom built aquarium on Washington Street in Boston’s Downtown Crossing. Today, there’s no sea world near Boston, and our New England Aquarium doesn’t hold any whales o ...

Henry Knox commanded the Continental Army’s artillery, founded the academy that became West Point, and went on to become the first Secretary of War for the new United States. Before any of that, though, he was a young man in Boston. He was a Whig s ...

From his Harvard graduation in 1895 to his death in 1934, William Monroe Trotter was one of the most influential and uncompromising advocates for the rights of Black Americans. He was a leader who had the vision to co-found groups like the Niagara M ...

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 fo ...

In the late summer of 1775, a terrible epidemic struck Boston, and much of New England. As the Revolutionary War heated up, and the siege of Boston reached its peak, both armies faced an invisible enemy. Judy Cataldo will join us on the show this w ...

In the early 20th century, car dealerships, tire companies, parts distributors, and other related businesses lined a section of Commonwealth Avenue in Allston that was known as Automobile Row, a sort of urban forefather of the suburban Auto Mile toda ...

Doctor Thomas Young was a native of New York’s Hudson Valley who seemed to be present at all of Boston’s revolutionary events, from the creation of the committee of correspondence, to the Boston Massacre, to the Tea Party. He had been an early and i ...

Built in 1637, the Fairbanks House in Dedham is the oldest building in Massachusetts and the oldest wood-framed building in North America. It was occupied by the members of the Fairbanks family for nearly 300 years. In this interview from August 2018 ...