Grating The Nutmeg

In our first episode for 2020, state historian Walt Woodward interviews author and historian Tom Shachtman talks about his just released book, The Founding Fortunes: How America's Wealthy Paid for and Profited From America's Revolution. In this fascinating economic history covering the years from the Birth of the Republic to the end of the War of 1812, Shachtman asks an important question most historians don't consider: Who paid  for the war for independence? The answers come with some profound insights that still resonate in the present. Shachtman also helps us understand the national significance of a number of famous Revolutionary Connecticans, including Jeremiah Wadsworth, SIlas Deane, Eli Whitney, John Fitch, and Oliver Wolcott, Jr.  

         For your holiday enjoyment, State Historian Walt Woodward has gathered together three historic Connecticut Christmas stories, and a Christmas Song: Francis S. Parsons "The Christmas Party" (1923), Louise Chandler Moulton's "What Came to Olive Haygarth" (1867), Abby Allin's "Old Santa Claus (1850), and Walt Woodward's own "A Children's Christmas."  Happy Holidays From All the Grating the Nutmeg Team. 

Maps tell stories. In this episode of Grating the Nutmeg, Natalie Belanger and Ben Gammell of the CT Historical Society uncover the little-known story of 18th-century cartographer Bernard Romans. A new exhibit of his maps at the museum pieces together the life story of a bold, talented, and adventurous immigrant to Connecticut who put his considerable skills to work for the American cause and may have paid the ultimate price for it.  “War, Maps, Mystery: Dutch Mapmaker Bernard Romans and the American Revolution” is on view at the Connecticut Historical Society until May 2, 2020. To learn more, visit chs.org.   For more great stories on maps, order Connecticut  Explored’s back issue for Spring 2012 -entitled “Putting Connecticut on the Map”- at our website at ctexplored.org This episode was produced by Mary Donohue, Asst. Publisher of Connecticut Explored, and engineered by Patrick O’Sullivan.   

     For more than a generation, Kendall F. Wiggin has been one of the most influential champions of history issues and institutions in Connecticut. At the end of 2019, Ken is retiring after 21 years as Connecticut's State Librarian. In a revealing interview, State Historian Walter Woodward sat down with Ken for a wide-ranging discussion about his agency's complex role in preserving the state's past, the effect of the Internet on historical research and libraries, the role of Connecticut history in public education, his successes and regrets, some advice for his successor, and more.  

How did Mark Twain aka Samuel Clemons use scrapbooks to fight unscrupulous publishers who reprinted his work without paying him? Why did celebrities like Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony keep scrapbooks? How did abolitionists, suffragettes, and African Americans use scrapbooks to tell their story? Before the era of google and Instagram, how did American use scrapbooks to curate printed stories that contained information they wanted to save for the future? In this episode, our guest, Dr. Ellen Gruber Garvey explores how Americans from all walks of life created scrapbooks to document, store, critique, and participate in a rapidly changing world of information overload. This episode was recorded as a lecture at the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center. You’ll have to use your imagination a little to picture some of the types of scrapbooks that Dr. Garvey refers to but you’ll be fascinated by impact scrapbooks had on American history. We wish to thank our guest Dr. Ellen Gruber Garvey, professor

      Say the name Wilbur Cross and most Connecticans think of a parkway. Wilbur Cross the man, however, was a Connectican of extraordinary accomplishment. Born in 1862 in the factory village of Gurleyville, he became a world-class scholar, author, educational reformer, founding Dean of the Yale Graduate school, and, starting at age 68, a popular four-term governor who guided Connecticut through the worst years of the Great Depression.  In this episode, state historian Walt Woodward sits down at the New Haven Museum with poet and publisher David Wilk, whose City Point Press recently reissued Cross's 1943 autobiography Connecticut Yankee: An Autobiography of Wilbur L. Cross, to discuss Cross's remarkable nineteenth and twentieth century life.  As a bonus, we include a reading by David Wilk of Wilbur Cross's 1936 Thanksgiving Proclamation, regarded then and now for its eloquent invitation to thankful reflection. 

Our guest, Elisabeth Petry is a journalist. She knows how to uncover a clue, follow a lead, and tell a good story. Her mother was bestselling novelist Ann Petry, whose 1946 debut novel The Street became the first novel by an African American to sell more than a million copies. In this episode, Liz tells us more about her family tree—the James and Lane Families—four generations of strivers and achievers descended from self-emancipated slaves, who settled in New Haven, Hartford, and Old Saybrook, Connecticut. Four hundred family letters survive, many of which contained stories that were fodder for Ann Petry’s novels. Hear more about how Liz and two of her cousins are taking the family’s story to the screen. We join Steve Courtney at the Mark Twain House & Museum as he introduces the lecture from which this podcast was recorded. We wish to thank our guest Elisabeth Petry and the host for the lecture, the Mark Twain House & Museum. Read more about Liz’s search for her family history in the Fall 2019 issu

           Every Governor of our state makes history, but there have been very few who know their history as well as Connecticut’s current governor Edward M. "Ned" Lamont.”         In this very special episode, Mary Donohue and Walt Woodward, along with Connecticut Explored publisher Elizabeth Normen and producer Patrick O'Sullivan went to the state capitol to talk with Governor Lamont about a speech – and now audio essay he recorded for this podcast – titled “100 Years of Fake News and Real and Fake Wars.” In an era when Americans are challenged to separate fact from fiction in a myriad of different media, the Governor’s message is a kind of cautionary tale for all of us. And, as you’ll see, it reflects some keen and insightful thinking from a governor who takes his history seriously. 

Four hundred years ago, in August 1619, more than 20 kidnapped enslaved African people were sold to the Virginia colonists. Slavery was well established in the early Connecticut Colony, too. Traded, sold, given as gifts, and subjected to beatings as documents attest, the enslaved people of Hartford suffered no less than enslaved people anywhere. In today’s episode, Connecticut Explored’s Mary Donohue finds out about an innovative, model project that uses fine-grained scholarship to uncover the lives of almost 500 Africans, African Americans, and Native Americans buried between 1640 and 1815 in Hartford’s oldest historic site, the Ancient Burying Ground. She talks with Dr. Kathy Hermes, professor at Central Connecticut State University, about the project, sponsored by the Ancient Burying Ground Association and about the new website that makes all this research available with a click of a mouse. For more information, visit the new website at www.africannativeburialsct.org. Join us on September 12, 2019 at 6

Food historian and author of Pizza in New Haven Colin M. Caplin tells State Historian Walt Woodward and co-host Betsy Golden Kellem the fascinating story of the creation and rise to world-class celebrity of New Haven Pizza. Join us at Modern Apizza in New Haven for a lunch-time food and information feast you won’t want to miss. And at the end, you’ll hear about a special offer that might have you joining Walt Betsy and Colin for another podcast lunch and another slice of New Haven Pizza.

In this installment of GTN, Natalie Belanger of the Connecticut Historical Society takes a walk through the museum's archival collection of documents related to the Ku Klux Klan. You'll learn about the Klan's sudden rise, and rapid fall, in 1920s Connecticut, a dark time when Connecticut was torn by disagreements over immigration policy and the changing demographics of United States. To learn more, you can join Natalie at the Connecticut Historical Society on September 14, 2019 for a gallery program related to this topic, or visit the CHS's Research Center anytime to view the Ku Klux Klan documents yourself.    This episode was produced by Natalie Belanger and engineered by Patrick O’Sullivan. To hear more episodes of Grating the Nutmeg subscribe on iTunes, iHeartRadio, GooglePlay, Spotify or at gratingthenutmeg.libsyn.com. And for more great Connecticut history stories, subscribe to Connecticut Explored, the magazine of Connecticut history, at ctexplored.org Please leave a review on iTunes for Grating

In this Gate-leg Table interview with state historian Walt Woodward, transportation historian Richard DeLuca takes us on an expert's tour of Connecticut's long history of charging people to get from here to there. From turnpikes to bicycle roads, the state highway system to the parkways and toll roads Connecticut got rid of in the 1980s, DeLuca provides the background you need to make good decisions about The Toll Question in Connecticut. DeLuca is the author of POST ROADS AND IRON HORSES and PAVED ROADS AND PUBLIC MONEY, forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press. 

Two of Connecticut’s most influential women, Beatrice Fox Auerbach, the owner of G. Fox, the largest privately-owned department store in the United States at the time and U.S. Congresswoman Chase Going Woodhouse, the second woman to be elected to the US Congress from Connecticut, spent seven weeks travelling through 10 countries in the Middle East and Europe in 1949. Only four years after the end of WWII and one year after the founding of the new nation of Israel, Auerbach and Woodhouse were shown battlefields, refugee camps, and the ruins of German cities. Auerbach’s diary entries reveal what she saw and experienced-civil war in Greece, Arab refugee camps in Transjordan, the value of using Hebrew in Israel, and the fear of rising anti-Semitism and communism in Germany. In this episode, edited from a lecture given at the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Hartford, Dr. Tracey Wilson comments on Auerbach and Woodhouse’s contribution to the development of women in leadership roles in Connecticut and reads fro

This summer the Connecticut Historical Society is hosting an exhibition called Black Citizenship in the Age of Jim Crow. It’s a traveling show that originated at the New-York Historical Society. The exhibition explores the struggle for full citizenship and racial equality that unfolded after the Civil War. Even though northern states like Connecticut did not institute Jim Crow segregation by law, discrimination and segregation were the norm in many public spaces, including elegant department stores like New York City’s Macy’s, Bloomingdales, and Hartford’s G. Fox. In this episode, Dr. Traci Parker of the University of Massachusetts, with some editorial commentary from host Natalie Belanger talk about what department stores like G. Fox meant to consumers and retail workers alike, and how they become sites of struggle in the civil rights movement.     Dr. Parker’s new book is Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement: Workers, Consumers, and Civil Rights from the 1930s to the 1980s published by the

BONUS CONTENT: LECTURE ONLY 

  In Part 2 of our Series Commemorating the 250th Anniversary of the Founding of Dartmouth College and Its Roots in the town of Columbia. Mohegan Elder Beth Regan tells the story of Samson Occom. Occom,  a Mohegan convert to Christianity,  was educated by Rev. Eleazar Wheelock, became a teacher and minister, raised much of the money used to establish Dartmouth, and went on to found the utopian native Christian community of Brothertown, New York. Occom’s story as told by Mohegan elder Regan provides a different and importantperspective on Dartmouth’s founding, one that is not to be missed.   This episode is dedicated to Mohegan Nonner and elder Faith Damon Davison, with whom Regan was to give her talk. She was prevented by the onset of an illness that led to her passing a few weeks later. A wise and wonderful person, Nonner Faith Damon Davison will be missed by all of us who knew her, - 

Recently, alumni of Dartmouth College, members of the Mohegan nation, the Columbia Historical Society and state and local officials gathered in the quiet corner town of Columbia to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the founding of that Ivy League Institution. Why Columbia? That is where the Great Awakening minister Eleazar Wheelock, inspired by the educational achievements of Mohegan student Samson Occom, founded Moor’s Indian Charity School, the training school for indigenous missionaries that led directly to Wheelock’s founding of Dartmouth in 1769. In this episode, following Elder Beth Regan’s Mohegan-language conference invocation, state historian Walt Woodward describes Eleazar Wheelock’s life as a local minister and Great Awakening evangelist, his relationship with Samson Occom, and life at Moor’s Indian Charity School. “Eleazar Wheelock, the Great Awakening, Samson Occom, and the Indian School -  This episode of Grating the Nutmeg.”

This episode celebrates the 100th anniversary of the most influential design school of the twentieth century, the Bauhaus, and Connecticut’s connection to it. Connecticut Explored’s Assistant Publisher Mary Donohue and conceptual artist, photographer and frequent Connecticut Explored contributor Bob Gregson talk about pioneering Modern artists Anni and Josef Albers, who escaped Nazi Germany in the 1930s and made New Haven their home in  1950. It’s a remarkable story. Josef was associated with the Bauhaus longer than any other artist and Anni was the last surviving teacher from the Bauhaus. Both had independent careers as world  famous, influential teachers and artists.     For more information about the Albers, read Bob’s feature story in the Winter 2018-2019 issue of Connecticut Explored at ctexplored.org and for more about the Albers,  go to the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation’s website at albersfoundation.org.  For more about our guest, go to BobGregson.com   This episode was hosted and produced by Mar

                It’s not very often that a historian interviews a poet for a history podcast, but in this episode state historian Walt Woodward interviews award-winning poet, novelist, essayist, environmentalist, and former Deputy Commission of the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection David K. Leff about his   new verse novel, The Breach: Voices Haunting a New England Mill Town (Homebound Books, 2019). The Breach is a fascinating study of decline in  a New England factory village  caught in the throes of both an economic and an environmental crisis. And - plus, plus, plus - it’s a story  told mostly by historical objects. Leff talks about his book,  the reasons he lets objects tell the story, and reads some of the entries, too.   Warning: Leff's readings contain a bit of profanity, one violent episode, and a hint of sex.  

In this podcast cross-over episode,  Johnna Kaplan, author of Connecticut Explored's spring 2019 story about Fort Trumbull in New London, Connecticut is joined by her Going/Steadypodcast co-host Kerri Provost. Listen as they dive into the history of Fort Trumbull, a Connecticut state park that’s seen a devastating Revolutionary War battle, witnessed Prohibition-era high-speed boat chases, and housed a top-secret military research facility. Today Fort Trumbull is one of New London’s must-visit attractions, part of the new Thames River Heritage Park.  Thanks to the co-hosts of Going/Steady, Kerri Provost of Real Hartford and Johnna Kaplan of The Size of Connecticut. Listen to Going/Steady podcast at goingsteadyct.com and on iTunes. For more information about the fort, visit ct.gov/deep and fortfriends.org.  For more about the summer water taxi and historic attractions go to thamesriverheritagepark.org This episode produced by Mary Donohue and engineered by Patrick O’Sullivan. To hear more episodes of Grating t