Grating the Nutmeg

In celebration of our 10th anniversary, we are bringing you a remastered edition of an episode recorded in 2017 at the University of Hartford as part of the Presidents' College and Connecticut Explored 's "Connecticans in the American West" lecture series. In this episode, Dr.  Leah Glaser tells the story of Sam Colt's investment in the Sonora Exploring and Mining Company in the 1850s, a company t...

  In the 1600s, Connecticut settlers had to contend with a multitude of threats to their survival, both as individuals and as a colony. Those threats weren't just internal — poor harvests, disease, religious strife — but external, too. The colonists were caught up in a complicated web of international diplomacy, vulnerable to the ambitions of imperial powers like the Spanish, the Dutch, the Englis...

  This episode tells the story of one of the women depicted in The Six Triple Eight , a 2024 WWII war drama film by Tyler Perry that tells the true story of the 6888 Central Postal Directory Battalion. Mary Jewel Barlow was one of only three members of the 6888 th Postal Directory Battalion who died in service during World War II and one of only four women buried in the Normandy American Cemetery...

In celebration of our tenth anniversary, we are bringing you a remastered edition of an episode recorded in 2018 by Dr. Walter Woodward, Connecticut State Historian Emeritus with Dr. Fiona Vernal and former Hartford History Center Program Manager Jasmin Agusto. Dr. Vernal serves on the Connecticut Explored magazine Editorial Board. She holds a BA in history from Princeton University and a PhD. fro...

  From the high seas to the town square, we're bringing you the story of a New England family navigating revolution, economic expansion, and nation building. Awakenings and Revolutions: The Harts, Saybrook, and the New Nation is a new look at the residents of the Old Saybrook Historical Society's Gen. William Hart House and the Hart family of Old Saybrook, Connecticut. Moving between the Connectic...

  In 2006, Preservation Connecticut , then the Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation, realized that historic barns across the state were being demolished or allowed to fall down. What could be done to save them? Where were they? How many are there? How can we get people across the state to be interested in barns? All of this was unknown. My guest, Todd Levine, was hired to help answer those...

Happy 250 th birthday to our nation and 10th anniversary to Grating the Nutmeg! In celebration of our 10 th  anniversary, we are bringing you a remastered edition of an episode recorded in 20 20   with Dr. Walter Woodward , Connecticut State Historian Emeritus. Dr. Woodward takes a new look at the actions surrounding the Revolutionary War execution of S tate H ero Nathan Hale, and finds there are...

What's the first thing you do when you want to take a trip? Look through Instagram to find things to do? Or Yelp for restaurants that serve local cuisine? Today travelers can follow social media influencers and websites that promise to give you an insider's look at places to stay or the best discounted hotel rates. But for Black travelers in the Jim Crow era through the 1960s, it wasn't easy to fi...

In this episode, you'll be introduced to John Hooker, a Hartford lawyer, judge, and abolitionist as well as a reformer for women's rights. Hooker was the president of the anti-slavery committee in Hartford, published the Charter Oak anti-slavery newspaper with the Connecticut Anti-Slavery Society of Hartford, and co-authored with his wife Isabella Beecher Hooker, the state bill in 1877 that gave m...

In 1955, a group of disabled young adults living at New Britain Memorial Hospital signed a letter declaring their intention to seek out "adventuresome living for the physically handicapped." They formed a nonprofit called New Horizons and set out on a thirty-year journey to raise money and navigate legal barriers in order to realize their most cherished dream: a housing complex for the disabled, r...

Famine Irish, lace-curtain Irish, shanty Irish: the Irish Diaspora has shaped Connecticut's European immigrant history from the 1840s.  Traces of Irish history and culture in the state are not only found in archival and artifact collections but also through the historic buildings, neighborhoods, and cemeteries that stand across the state. Whether they were immigrants, expatriates, refugees, or ind...

If you are driving in Bristol, Connecticut-maybe you're going to Lake Compounce Amusement Park - and suddenly you spy a cluster of huge satellite dishes, you might wonder if space aliens had really landed. But what you've discovered is the home base of ESPN - originally entitled the Entertainment & Sports Programming Network - shortened to ESPN in 1985.   Every year tens of millions of fans watch...

I've got a story about an artist that I've been obsessed with for years. In this episode, Patricia Hoerth Batchelder talks about her new biography of Evelyn Beatrice Longman, The Woman Who Sculpted Golden Boy, Thomas Edison, and Other Monuments. Poor, motherless at five, and uneducated after elementary school, Longman made the highly ambitious claim at nineteen that she could create monumental scu...

  Last year, in Episode 217, listeners were introduced to Hannah Smith. Born in 1767, Hannah was the matriarch of the non-conformist Smith Family of Glastonbury. In the 2020s, her diaries inspired Leonard Raybon, a music professor at Tulane, to compose an original mini-musical based on her writings. You can view the debut performance of "Hannah and Her Daughters"  here .    This episode focuses on...

  Grating the Nutmeg is 10 years old! In celebration of our 10 th anniversary, we are bringing you a remastered and re-edited edition of an episode we recorded in 2016 at the New Haven Museum with Alfred Marder, Judge Andrew Roraback and his father Charles Roraback. This compelling first-person interview with Alfred Marder shares his experiences as a defendant in New Haven's Smith trial. Mr. Marde...

Connecticut is a small state that has had a huge national impact. In this episode, we celebrate someone that we are proud to say was born in Connecticut and went on to be a pioneering historian in Black history. Dr. Lorenzo Johnston Greene received his BA in from Howard University in 1924, his MA from Columbia University in 1926 and his Ph. D. in 1942. He was born in Ansonia, Connecticut. We can l...

  At first glance, alcohol and racial equality might seem unrelated—but for Black activists, the temperance movement was a powerful vehicle for social change. In this episode of Grating the Nutmeg , Natalie Belanger of the Connecticut Museum chats with Mackenzie Tor about her research into Black temperance activism in 1830s and 1840s Connecticut. Mackenzie talks about how people like Maria Stewart...

During this holiday season, it seems like the perfect time to bring you the story of one of the bestselling toys ever - Cabbage Patch Kids! Inducted into the Toy Hall of Fame in 2023, Cabbage Patch Kids set every toy industry sales record for three years running from 1983-86, and has become one of the longest-running doll franchises in the United States. How did a Connecticut company produce the h...

  More than twenty thousand Hispanic Americans served in the Civil War. When Cuban-born Loreta Velázquez's husband would not allow her to join him on the battlefield, she assumed the role of First Lieutenant Harry T. Buford to be near him. Philip Bazaar, born in Chile, was awarded the Medal of Honor for his courageous exploits during the assault of Fort Fisher. The spying efforts of Floridian Mari...

The Connecticut Yankee atomic power plant was one of the earliest commercial nuclear reactors in New England.  Though it was dismantled at the turn of the 21st century, its legacy remains, both for the landscape of the Connecticut River Valley where it once stood, and for contemporary debates about energy today.  This episode explores the plant's life and afterlife, the activists who opposed it, a...

  The transgender community has struggled to receive recognition and equality.  In this episode, we explore the history of the transgender community over the last 100 years with Dr. Susan Stryker and the life of Dr. Alan L. Hart, a transgender medical doctor working on the forefront of an urgent public health crisis, tuberculosis, in Connecticut. Hart, Director of Connecticut's Office of TB Rehabi...

A button sounds like a very ordinary thing. But button production in Cheshire was part of Connecticut's pioneering role in the precision manufacturing revolution of the nineteenth century. According to connecticuthistory.org, button production began with pewter buttons in the mid-eighteenth century but quickly turned to brass in the early nineteenth century.  By 1860s, machines in the Scovill Bras...

  In this episode of   Grating the Nutmeg , Natalie Belanger tells us about how two journals kept by a Revolutionary War-era girl in the Connecticut Museum of Culture and History 's  collection have inspired an original work of music.    Several years ago, Leonard Raybon (Associate Professor of Music at Tulane University) encountered two journals and other writings by Hannah Hadassah Hickok, held...

Immigrants from Lithuania who made their way to New Britain, Connecticut at the beginning of the twentieth century found work in the city's factories turning out tools and hardware. Their weekly routine included work, church and socializing at neighborhood saloons. But major upheavals in American society were happening at the time that affected their lives including the rise of organized labor, th...

  Artist and author Maurice Sendak was able to achieve significant and enduring success in art and children's literature during his lifetime. But what secrets did he had to keep from his family, publishers, parents, librarians, and readers as a gay, Jewish man negotiating the field of children's literature?   Sendak wrote and illustrated books that nurtured children and adults alike. Winner of the...