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
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...
In this episode, Host Mary Donohue talks to Griffin Dunne, actor, producer and director and now New York Times best-selling author about his family memoir The Friday Afternoon Club. His Har...
We did it!! This is our 200th episode of Grating the Nutmeg! Thanks to our listeners, we have travelled across the state during every time period to bring you vivid, fascinating s...
We all know a little about New England and Connecticut’s European maritime history. Dutch traders came to North America to trade for beaver pelts and English colonists came to start ...
Early voting has already started in the 2024 presidential election and I just couldn’t resist the suggestion by my guests to explore what Samuel Clemens alias Mark Twain, Hartford’s greatest Gi...
Have you got your Halloween costume ready? Been on any graveyard tours this month? Well, this story for you! I’d never thought of body snatching as having anything to do with Conne...
Most people know something about Mark Twain, the pen name of Samuel Clemens. After all, he wrote his most famous books while living in Hartford, Connecticut. His 25-room house on Far...
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