My new book recreates the strange story of the whaling bark Progress - a New Bedford whaler transformed into a whaling museum for Chicago’s 1893 world’s fair. Here’s how Dan described the book in an email to me: If your definition of greater Boston to is broad enough to include Salem and New Bedford, this should talk is for you. I had to pass on interviewing Dan about the book a while back, because Boston didn’t feature heavily enough. On Thursday, August 27, History Camp will host a virtual author talk with Dan Gifford about his book The Last Voyage of the Whaling Bark Progress: New Bedford, Chicago and the Twilight of an Industry. Although Boston’s relationship with the Crown had long been tumultuous-a circumstance evident as early as 1689, when Bostonians deposed their royal governor-Coss makes a convincing argument that the introduction of a partisan, independent press in the first half of the 18th century was either a cause or a consequence of an underlying dissatisfaction that led directly to the events of the second half. The tensions between an honest reporting of a disease’s spread and the government’s desire to downplay both the risk and its own culpability in the outbreak are in full view in Coss’s history. Moreover, it provides perhaps the earliest example of an independent press covering a colonial epidemic in ways not officially sanctioned by the government. And thanks to the coincidence of timing, the newspaper’s editorial focus at its launch reflected deep concern with the disease taking hold of the city. Its emergence marked the beginning of a nascent nation’s obsession with partisan broadsheets. Just as smallpox was beginning to take hold in Boston, James Franklin, elder brother of a more famous Franklin, launched the first independent newspaper in the colonies, The New-England Courant. Though it (like the book) was written in 2016, this review in American Scientist has heavy shades of America 2020:Īlthough the book’s eponymous fever is smallpox-and smallpox does frame the events described in the book-writer and independent scholar Coss maintains that another kind of fever marks 1721 as pivotal in American history. Coss also argues that 1721 was the year when Boston’s sentiments began turning against crown government. It was also the year when James Franklin launched a new newspaper called the New-England Courant, the first independent paper in the colonies, where his famous brother Ben would learn the publishing trade. In 1721, Boston was wracked by a smallpox epidemic that prompted Cotton Mather and Zabadiel Boylston to begin inoculating residents against the disease using a method they used from Oneismus, who was enslaved by Mather. It promises to weave together three threads in Boston history. We’ve done not one but two episodes about the 1721 smallpox inoculation controversy in Boston without reading Steven Coss’s book The Fever of 1721: The Epidemic That Revolutionized Medicine and American Politics. Images above via the Museum of Fine Arts: McKay, Shipyard, House, Flying Cloud, Model, Champion.In this 1851 map of East Boston, look for McKay’s shipyard just to the right of the “I” in Mystic River.Boston institutions funded by the 19th century opium trade.Catch Steven at the East Boston Social Centers on Jfor a talk and book signing, complete with sea chantey singing and a tour of Donald McKay’s house.Buy the book from Simon and Schuster or Amazon.He also describes how they were used to trade for tea in China or gold in California, and how they helped America’s most prominent families amass fortunes through opium smuggling. Stephen takes us back to an era when the fastest, most elegant ships in the world were built in the East Boston shipyard of Donald McKay. 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.
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