Examines the lives of immigrants in Boston from 1790 to 1880, discussing the process of arrival in the city, the physical and economic adjustment, the development of group consciousness, hostility toward the Irish, and the city's eventual relative stability.
**** Handlin's classic (first published in 1941) is reprinted here from the 1979 edition. BCL3 recommended the (then latest) 1959 version. The original was v.50 of Harvard historical studies. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Discusses how activists in Boston upheld their anti-slavery tradition and promoted an equal rights agenda during the years between 1890 and 1920, a period in which African-Americans throughout the country were being deprived of civil and political justice.
In nineteenth-century America, the bourgeois home epitomized family, morality, and virtue. But this era also witnessed massive urban growth and the acceptance of the market as the overarching model for economic relations. A rapidly changing environment bred the antithesis of "home": the urban boardinghouse. In this groundbreaking study, Wendy Gamber explores the experiences of the numerous people—old and young, married and single, rich and poor—who made boardinghouses their homes. Gamber contends that the very existence of the boardinghouse helped create the domestic ideal of the single family home. Where the home was private, the boardinghouse theoretically was public. If homes nurtured virtue, boardinghouses supposedly bred vice. Focusing on the larger cultural meanings and the commonplace realities of women’s work, she examines how the houses were run, the landladies who operated them, and the day-to-day considerations of food, cleanliness, and petty crime. From ravenous bedbugs to penny-pinching landladies, from disreputable housemates to "boarder's beef," Gamber illuminates the annoyances—and the satisfactions—of nineteenth-century boarding life.
“Dain’s A History of Boston helps the reader understand how land-use and environment contribute to shaping a community. Dain’s Boston is the go-to book.” - R.J. Lyman Boston is today one of the world’s greatest cities, first in higher education, hospitals, life science companies, and sports teams. It was the home of the Great Puritan Migration, the American Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the first civil rights movement, the abolition movement, and the women’s rights movement. But the city that gave us the first use of ether as anesthesia, the telephone, technicolor film, and the mutual fund—the city where Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott founded their world-changing partnership—was also the hub of the anti-immigration movement, the divisive busing era, and decades of self-inflicted decay. Boston has the most important history of any American city. Yet its history has never been given a comprehensive treatment until now. Join Dan Dain as he acts as your tour guide from the arrival of First Peoples up to the election of Boston’s first woman and person of color as mayor. Dain’s masterful work explores the policies and practices that took Boston from its highest heights to its lowest lows and back again, and examines the central role that density, diversity, and good urban design play in the success of cities like Boston.
This is a work in both the social history of professional historians, and a sociology of knowledge study of how and why a discipline surrenders the search for truth in favor of assertions of ideological purity. In a frenzied effort to cope with exaggerated claims that the study of history is the high road to statesmanship, citizenship, and good neighbors, historians struggled to innovate. Some became radicalized and threatened to tear the world apart, but the more common response was the assertion that the subject would equip citizens to solve current and future policy problems.
A Companion to American Cultural History offers a historiographic overview of the scholarship, with special attention to the major studies and debates that have shaped the field, and an assessment of where it is currently headed. 30 essays explore the history of American culture at all analytic levels Written by scholarly experts well-versed in the questions and controversies that have activated interest in this burgeoning field Part of the authoritative Blackwell Companions to American History series Provides both a chronological and thematic approach: topics range from British America in the Eighteenth Century to the modern day globalization of American Culture; thematic approaches include gender and sexuality and popular culture
"On June 15, 1929, with Dr. John G. Cullinan, Reverend Thomas J. Hill and Father Healy by his side, William Swanton signed his name for the very last time . I wasn't there, of course, but I can imagine him raising his pen with an age-spotted, quivering hand to the document presented to him on his deathbed. This document would affect the lives of many people for many years to come. William's story, however, begins 74 years earlier in rural County Cork, Ireland." This book chronicles the lives of William Swanton and his wife, Anne (O'Neil) Swanton. They were born in neighboring townlands in rural County Cork and immigrated to Boston, where they lived until the 1920s. William Swanton was a larger-than-life figure who cut a wide swath as he charged through life. Accounts of rural country life, chain migration, women's rights, upward mobility in a new country, venereal disease, marital separation and insanity all provide a fascinating glimpse into the past.