Grating the Nutmeg

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...

  Whaling was big business. Connecticut and her sister New England states built ships, forged cast iron tools, produced wooden storage casks and outfitted sailors. Stonington, Mystic, New London, and New Haven were part of New England's predominance in successful whaling. We're going to get into the nitty gritty of the trade in this episode and hear about some of the striking artifacts from Mystic...

  The Redding Encampment, Connecticut's first State Archaeological Preserve, is located in Putnam Memorial State Park. Understanding of the Revolutionary War has emphasized the battles, maneuvers, and war meetings; but far more time was expended during the long periods of winter encampment. The winter months were a brutal test of individual fortitude, unifying command, and local support. In the jo...

  Connecticut Explored and our podcast, Grating the Nutmeg , have featured many of the heritage trails that mark the important histories and sites of Connecticut's people. Preservation Connecticut has undertaken a survey of LGBTQ+ heritage sites across the state. Now, Grating the Nutmeg and Preservation Connecticut have teamed up to bring you a three-episode podcast series that pairs new research...

  American whale oil lit the world. The Industrial Revolution couldn't have happened without it. Connecticut was part of the whaling industry of the nineteenth century that sent thousands of American ships manned by tens of thousands of men to hunt whales across the world's oceans. Stonington, Mystic, New London, and New Haven were part of New England's predominance in successful   whaling. In fac...

  In this episode, host Mary Donohue visits the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury, a place that includes stellar architecture, art by some of the most renowned artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and an exhibition that tells the story of Waterbury's rise as a manufacturing powerhouse. The Mattatuck Museum is an art and regional history museum on the Green in downtown Waterbury, that sta...

  In this episode, Natalie Belanger of the CT Museum of Culture and History tells the story of the Good Will Club, the forerunner of the youth club movement that got its start in Hartford. But the story of the club can't be separated from that of its founder, a woman who's an inductee of the CT Women's Hall of Fame for her barrier-breaking work in the legal field.   There are lots of ways to learn...