Stephen Jenkins has chosen for the subject of this volume the oldest and most northerly of the post roads: that over which the first postrider went; which echoed to the war-whoop of the savage, saw the passage of soldiers during the French Wars; beheld the flocking of the minutemen upon the Lexington Alarm, later became the pathway of countless thousands of emigrants on their way to the rich valleys of the Mohawk and the Genesee, or to the fertile prairies of the Middle West. By this route, via New Haven, Hartford, Springfield, and Worcester, a monthly mail was established in 1673, "the first mail upon the continent of America," as the author declares. He traces these pioneer settlements to their present positions as mauufacturing towns and cities.
A VIVID AND FASCINATING LOOK AT AMERICAN HISTORY THROUGH THE PRISM OF THE COUNTRY’S MOST STORIED HIGHWAY, THE BOSTON POST ROAD During its evolution from Indian trails to modern interstates, the Boston Post Road, a system of over-land routes between New York City and Boston, has carried not just travelers and mail but the march of American history itself. Eric Jaffe captures the progress of people and culture along the road through four centuries, from its earliest days as the king of England’s “best highway” to the current era. Centuries before the telephone, radio, or Internet, the Boston Post Road was the primary conduit of America’s prosperity and growth. News, rumor, political intrigue, financial transactions, and personal missives traveled with increasing rapidity, as did people from every walk of life. From post riders bearing the alarms of revolution, to coaches carrying George Washington on his first presidential tour, to railroads transporting soldiers to the Civil War, the Boston Post Road has been essential to the political, economic, and social development of the United States. Continuously raised, improved, rerouted, and widened for faster and heavier traffic, the road played a key role in the advent of newspapers, stagecoach travel, textiles, mass-produced bicycles and guns, commuter railroads, automobiles—even Manhattan’s modern grid. Many famous Americans traveled the highway, and it drew the keen attention of such diverse personages as Benjamin Franklin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, P. T. Barnum, J. P. Morgan, and Robert Moses. Eric Jaffe weaves this entertaining narrative with a historian’s eye for detail and a journalist’s flair for storytelling. A cast of historical figures, celebrated and unknown alike, tells the lost tale of this road. Revolutionary printer William Goddard created a postal network that united the colonies against the throne. General Washington struggled to hold the highway during the battle for Manhattan. Levi Pease convinced Americans to travel by stagecoach until, half a century later, Nathan Hale convinced them to go by train. Abe Lincoln, still a dark-horse candidate in early 1860, embarked on a railroad speaking tour along the route that clinched the presidency. Bomb builder Lester Barlow, inspired by the Post Road’s notorious traffic, nearly sold Congress on a national system of expressways twenty-five years before the Interstate Highway Act of 1956. Based on extensive travels of the highway, interviews with people living up and down the road, and primary sources unearthed from the great libraries between New York City and Boston—including letters, maps, contemporaneous newspapers, and long-forgotten government documents—The King’s Best Highway is a delightful read for American history buffs and lovers of narrative everywhere.
When Jim Botticelli launched the Dirty Old Boston Facebook page as a salute to the gritty city he once knew, he discovered that thousands of people were equally nostalgic and curious about Boston's recent past. And for good reason; after World War II, Boston changed rapidly, without apology, for better and worse, and in many ways forever.Dirty Old Boston chronicles the people, streets, and buildings from the postwar years to 1987. From ball games to dive bars, Dirty Old Boston also covers some of the city's most tumultuous events including the razing of neighborhoods, Boston's busing crisis, and the continual fight for affordable housing.Photographs—assembled from family albums, student projects, institutional archives, and professional collections—reveal Boston as seen from the streets. Illuminating Boston's tenacity and spirit, Dirty Old Boston presents our proud moments and our growing pains. Raw and beautiful, this book is an evocative tribute to the city and its people.
Here in this distinctive New England town, Main Street is the place to meet your neighbors, get a coffee, do your shopping, watch a parade, attend a concert, worship, vote or volunteer. And behind the familiar buildings is a colorful history. There's the humorist who organized his neighbors to buy land and build a town hall that later became the Katharine Hepburn Cultural Arts Center. The story of how the Monkey Farm got its name. The nighttime parade that draws thousands. And the heartwarming account of the shopkeeper who sent penny candy to students with good grades. Author Tedd Levy reveals the unique buildings, events, people and heritage of this distinctive thoroughfare.
"Herein, we bring you to sites that have been central to the lives of 'the people' of Greater Boston over four centuries. You'll visit sites associated with the area's indigenous inhabitants and with the individuals and movements who sought to abolish slavery, to end war, challenge militarism, and bring about a more peaceful world, to achieve racial equity, gender justice, and sexual liberation, and to secure the rights of workers. We take you to some well-known sites, but more often to ones far off the well-beaten path of the Freedom Trail, to places in Boston's outlying neighborhoods. We also visit sites in numerous other municipalities that make up the Greater Boston region-from places such as Lawrence, Lowell and Lynn to Concord and Plymouth. The sites to which we do 'travel' include homes given that people's struggles, activism, and organizing sometimes unfold, or are even birthed in many cases in living rooms and kitchens. Trying to capture a place as diverse and dynamic as Boston is highly challenging. (One could say that about any 'big' place.) We thus want to make clear that our goal is not to be comprehensive, or to 'do justice' to the region. Given the constraints of space and time as well as the limitations of knowledge--both our own and what is available in published form--there are many important sites, cities, and towns that we have not included. Thus, in exploring scores of sites across Boston and numerous municipalities, our modest goal is to paint a suggestive portrait of the greater urban area that highlights its long-contested nature. In many ways, we merely scratch the region's surface--or many surfaces--given the multiple layers that any one place embodies. In writing about Greater Boston as a place, we run the risk of suggesting that the city writ-large has some sort of essence. Indeed, the very notion of a particular place assumes intrinsic characteristics and an associated delimited space. After all, how can one distinguish one place from another if it has no uniqueness and is not geographically differentiated? Nonetheless, geographer Doreen Massey insists that we conceive of places as progressive, as flowing over the boundaries of any particular space, time, or society; in other words, we should see places as processual or ever-changing, as unbounded in that they shape and are shaped by other places and forces from without, and as having multiple identities. In exploring Greater Boston from many venues over 400 years, we embrace this approach. That said, we have to reconcile this with the need to delimit Greater Boston--for among other reasons, simply to be in a position to name it and thus distinguish it from elsewhere"--
