Boston has been a favorite backdrop for novels, films and television series, but some of the best stories about the city are true ones. Historian Ted Clarke explores these stories both the familiar and the obscure that have earned Boston such epithets as 'the epicenter of American crime fiction', 'the cradle of liberty' and 'the ice cream capital of the world'. The fifteen-foot tidal wave of molasses that roared down Commercial Street in 1919 is one of the more famous legends. Lesser known, but equally stunning, is the case of Albert Tirrell, who in 1845 murdered his mistress in a Boston...

Venture back to the Boston of the 1800s, when Back Bay was just a wide expanse of water to the west of the Shawmut Peninsula and merchants peddled their wares to sailors along the docks. Witness the beginning of the American Industrial Revolution, learn how a series of cultural movements made Boston the focal point of abolitionism in America, with leaders like William Lloyd Garrison, and see the golden age of the arts ushered in with notables Longfellow, Holmes, Copley, Sargent and Isabella Stewart Gardner. Travel with local historian Ted Clarke down the cobbled streets of Boston to discover...