HUB History - Our Favorite Stories from Boston History

This week, we’re going to wrap up our series on the Fugitive Slave Act, and the efforts of black and white abolitionists in Boston to resist what they saw as an unjust law. In last week’s show, we discussed how Lewis Hayden and the Vigilance Committ ...

With our new President doing his best to enforce unjust executive orders, we thought this would be a good moment to revisit an era in which Boston resisted an unjust law.  After Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, abolitionists in Boston ...

Lewis Hayden was born into slavery in Kentucky. When he was ten years old, his owner traded him to a traveling salesman for a pair of horses. But Hayden and his family eventually escaped to freedom, and they settled in Boston. Their Beacon Hill ho ...

Boston in the 1600s was a theocracy, where the Puritan church ruled, and women were seen in many ways as the property of their husbands or fathers. Against that backdrop, a woman named Katherine Nanny Naylor stands out. She was able to win a divorc ...

Welcome to part two of our inauguration special. On August 22, 1927, Bartolomeo Sacco and Nicola Vanzetti were executed in the electric chair at Boston's Charlestown State Prison. They were foreigners, accused of murder and ties to a shadowy terrori ...

Welcome to part one of our inauguration special. On a hot summer’s night in 1834, rumors swirled around a Catholic girls’ school in Charlestown. Catholicism was a frightening, unfamiliar religion, and Catholic immigrants were viewed with great susp ...

In August of 1801, a young man named Jason Fairbanks showed up on his sweetheart's doorstep. He was covered in blood, and telling the story of a suicide pact gone wrong. This tale of a rich kid gone astray could be ripped from the today's tabloid h ...

There is a long history of shipwrecks in Boston Harbor. Many are terrifying, some are tragic. But one shipwreck is such an oddity that Boston hasn't stopped talking about it for the past 75 years. When a freighter called The City of Salisbury stea ...

Life got in the way this week, and we didn't have a chance to prepare a full episode. We're going to do a miniature episode (minisode!), on this week’s historical anniversaries, with a quick discussion of Christmas in Puritan Boston. Enjoy! Show not ...

In 1901, a woman named Jane Toppan was arrested on Cape Cod for murder. By the time she went on trial, she had confessed to killing 31 people in Boston, Cambridge, on the Cape, and around the region, and she’s suspected of killing 100 or more. From a ...