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Rethinking our history, through holidays: A special Thanksgiving hour
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This is the Radio Boston rundown for November 25. Tiziana Dearing is our host.
We bring you a special hour of Radio Boston, listening back to conversations about rethinking history, through the celebration and commemoration of holidays.
- More than 400 years since the Mayflower landed in Patuxet, now known as Plymouth, we explore what a complete truth telling of the Mayflower story would mean. We revisit a conversation we had with Linda Coombs, who is a part of the Aquinnah-Wampanoag tribe, a tribal historian and independent scholar, about the less widely known history of indigenous people's here in Massachusetts. Then, we revisit a conversation we had with Paula Peters, a member of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe and an independent scholar of Wampanoag history, to talk about Indigenous People's Day and rethinking how we as a nation and commonwealth mark Columbus Day.
- We revisit an August conversation Radio Boston's Jamie Bologna had with Connecticut author Melanie Kirkpatrick about New Hampshire's own Sarah Josepha Hale. She was a complex, remarkable woman from the 19th century, championing women's rights to work and education long before Seneca Falls . Complex because she is credited with pushing President Abraham Lincoln to Thanksgiving a national holiday, while at the same time mostly ignoring the biggest issue of her time: race and slavery in America. Kirkpatrick's book is "Lady Editor, Sarah Josepha Hale And The Making Of The Modern American Woman."
- We cannot consider our commonwealth's history, and place it in truer light, without also acknowledging, and reckoning with our country's history with slavery and race. Juneteenth, at its most elemental level, is a celebration, marking the day in 1865 that slavery came to an end in Texas. This summer, as the nation observed it as a federal holiday for the first time, the commonwealth celebrated the day as an official state holiday, also for the first time. Back in June, we dove into the powerful history of Juneteenth with Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed, a professor at Harvard, and author of numerous books, including her latest: "On Juneteenth."
This program aired on November 25, 2021.
