Unscripted | with Fran Karttunen

Frances Karttunen has spent much of her life looking closely at the people Nantucket history too often leaves at the edges. In this conversation, she joins Below Deck Nantucket to talk about the lives, records, stories, and overlooked connections that have shaped the island across centuries — from whaling families and Native history to Cape Verdean, Portuguese, Hawaiian, and African American threads woven into Nantucket’s past. Karttunen reminds us that the island’s past was never as narrow as it is sometimes remembered. It was maritime, multilingual, interracial, international, and deeply connected to the wider world. The names, photographs, maps, census records, newspaper clips, and family stories all point to the same truth: Nantucket has always been shaped by more people, from more places, than the familiar story often allows. This is a conversation about history, but also about recovery — recovering names, places, lives, and connections that deserve to be seen again.