HUB History - Our Favorite Stories from Boston History

Co-host emerita Nikki and I are camping this weekend, so instead of a brand new episode, we’re giving you three classic stories about advances in transportation in Boston. First up, we’re going to take a look at a precursor to today’s MBTA. In the l ...

The early 20th century was a time of aviation firsts, and one of those firsts dropped into Boston for three long, exciting days in 1924. Five months after they started their journey in California, the Army Air Service pilots who made the first fligh ...

Dr. Rebecca Davis Lee Crumpler was the first Black woman to earn a medical degree in the US in 1864, and she spent most of her adult life in Charlestown, Beacon Hill, and the Readville section of Hyde Park. She devoted her career to pediatrics and o ...

Kick back and enjoy our interview with Stephen Ujifusa, author of Barons of the Sea, and Their Race to Build the World’s Fastest Clipper Ship, which originally aired in July 2018. Stephen takes us back to an era when the fastest, most elegant ships ...

In the 1940s, Boston was still an industrial city, and when the US entered World War II, that industrial might would be turned to wartime production. With industry comes labor disputes, and a new government agency was given extraordinary powers to re ...

One morning in August, redcoats fanned out across the province, taking entire families into custody, burning farms and crops, and killing livestock. Falling in the middle of two centuries of intermittent warfare, this grand derangement, or great uph ...

Faneuil Hall’s grasshopper weathervane is 4 feet long, weighs about 80 pounds, and is made out of copper that’s been covered with 23 carat gold. It’s found at the top of an 8 foot spire above Faneuil Hall’s cupola, which is in turn seven stories abov ...

Bloody Kansas was a deadly guerrilla war between so-called Border Ruffians from Missouri in support of slavery on one side, and earnest abolitionists from New England on the other. The violence peaked on Kansas prairies in the decade before the US C ...

You may have heard stories about the Confederate prisoners who were held at Fort Warren on Georges Island during the civil war. In this episode, we’ll explore a different island that housed prisoners during a different war. Our story will start wit ...

Prescott Townsend was one of the most interesting figures in Boston’s LGBTQ history. He was the ultimate Boston Brahmin, coming of age at Harvard in the shadow of Teddy Roosevelt and enlisting in the Navy during World War I. He served time in prison ...