Matrix funding for Backstories provided by an anonymous donor, the National Dama for the Humanities,

and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

From Virginia Humanities, this is Backstories.

Welcome to Backstories, the show that explains the history behind today's headlines.

I'm Nathan Connelly, and I'm Brian Ballot.

If you're new to the podcast, we're historians, and each week, along with our colleagues,

Ed Ayers and Joanne Friedman, we explore the history of one topic that's been in the news.

And we're going to start off today with a mystery.

On hot days in the North End of Boston, local folklore says you'll catch the unmistakable smell of molasses in the breeze.

Obviously, Boston is a really historical city.

There are a ton of things that happened here that shaped the entire nation.

The molasses flood is an interesting one because it was a horrible disaster.

Tons of people died. It was bloody and scary and gruesome.

But at the same time, because molasses was involved, people think of it as kind of this funny, tasty experience for people.

When it was really neither funny nor tasty for the people who were actually there.

That's local journalist Cara Jimow.

She was driven to write about the Boston molasses flood of 1919,

because the industrial accident, which claimed 21 lives, has been remembered, if at all, as kind of a joke.

I grew up in Massachusetts.

And as the historian Steve Puglio, who wrote kind of the definitive book on it, has said,

the molasses flood is a huge part of the city's folklore, but not necessarily its heritage.

And I'm interested in the difference between those two things, what makes something a good story that people like to kind of tell,

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