Grating the Nutmeg
Connecticut is a small state with big stories. GTN episodes include top-flight historians, compelling first-person stories and new voices in Connecticut history. Executive Producers Mary Donohue and Natalie Belanger look at the people and places that have made a difference in CT history. New episodes every two weeks. A production of Connecticut Explored magazine.
Episodes
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 ...
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 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 th...
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 ...
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.
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 ...
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 reader...
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 s...
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 duri...
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 Nutm...
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 L...
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...
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 Ha...
We're celebrating May, Historic Preservation Month, with an episode on the Modern houses of the 1950s and 1960s.
Could you live in a glass house? New Canaan, Conne...
In her new book, Book and Dagger, How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of the World, Dr. Elyse Graham tells the story of academics, like Yale literature professor Joseph Curtis, who hunted down German spies and turned them into double agents, and Sherman Kent, a Yale history professor who rose t...
Last year in episode 186, we talked about Grove Street Cemetery's pioneering role as the first planned cemetery in the country. The design of Grove Street Cemetery in New Haven ...
Coffee is more than a hot drink or a boost of caffeine. For Connecticans, it's hundreds of years of history. It has fueled new ideas, social reform, and workers' rights. It is comfort in wartime and connections across cultures. It is universal, yet distinctly local. In this episode, the Connecticut Museum of...
Carousels are marvels of brightly painted animals, mechanical excellence, music and lights. Located in a historic mill building in Bristol, the Carousel Museum houses well over 100 antique wooden carousel animals including white rabbits, pigs, lions and even an alligator. The museum has ...
The New Haven Museum staff and their community partners have reinterpreted the Amistad story in an exhibition that takes a new angle on the familiar story of the Amistad.
After a campaign initiated by schoolchildren, Prudence Crandall was designated the Connecticut State Heroine by the Connecticut General Assembly on Oct. 1, 1995. You may not know Connecticut has a state heroine, or you might have some inkling that Crandall was maybe a spinster Quaker schoolmarm, who had an...
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