Read complete books and articles on: Boston History

Boston - city (1990 pop. 574,283), state capital and seat of Suffolk co., E Mass., on Boston Bay, an arm of Massachusetts Bay; inc. 1822. The city includes former neighboring towns—Roxbury, West Roxbury, Dorchester, Charlestown, Brighton, and Hyde Park—annexed in the late 19th cent.

Economy

The largest city in New England, Boston is an educational, governmental, and financial center

Economy

The largest city in New England, Boston is an educational, governmental, and financial center and a leading fishing and commercial port. Its industries include publishing, food processing, and varied manufactures. High-technology research and development and computer and electronic manufacturing industries have flourished in the area, especially in the corridor along Boston's older peripheral highway (Routes 128 and 95). Tourism, much of it attracted by historic sites and cultural assets, has become increasingly important. Redevelopment in "the Hub" since the 1960s has focused on the Back Bay, where the John Hancock and Prudential buildings are New England's tallest, and on the city's compact downtown on the Shawmut Peninsula, where financial and other offices have been developed since the 1970s. Less than one fifth of the metropolitan area's residents, however, live in the city.

Points of Interest

Boston cherishes the landmarks of the past, especially in the narrow streets of the colonial city: the 17th-century house in which Paul Revere lived; Old North Church, famous for its part in Revere's "midnight ride"; Old South Meetinghouse, a rallying place for patriots during the Revolution; the old statehouse (1713), now a museum; the Boston Common, one of the oldest public parks in the country; Faneuil Hall; the gold-domed statehouse, designed by Charles Bulfinch; and the red-brick houses of Louisburg Square, among others. Famed Boston churches include King's Chapel, the birthplace of American Unitarianism (1785); the Mother Church of Christian Science; and Trinity Church (1872–77) in Copley Square, designed by H. H. Richardson. Boston Light (1716), at the entrance to Boston Harbor, is the oldest lighthouse in the United States.

Boston is one of the great cultural centers of the nation. In the city are the Massachusetts Historical Society (founded 1791); the Boston Athenaeum (1807); the Boston Public Library; the New England Conservatory of Music; Symphony Hall (home to the Boston Symphony Orchestra); the Museum of Fine Arts; the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum; the offices of the Christian Science Monitor; Harvard Medical School; the New England Medical Center; Massachusetts General Hospital; and Brigham and Women's hospitals. Educational institutions in the city include Boston, Suffolk, and Northeastern universities; the Univ. of Massachusetts at Boston, with the John F. Kennedy Library; Simmons, Emerson, and Emmanuel colleges; and the Boston Conservatory and Berklee College of Music. Together with such neighboring institutions as Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge), Tufts Univ. (Medford), and Boston College (Chestnut Hill), they make up the nation's leading educational complex, a reminder of Boston's old nickname, "the Athens of America."

The Boston Naval Shipyard (in operation 1800–1973) in Charlestown is the berth of the restored U.S.S. Constitution ("Old Ironsides"), launched (1797) a short distance away. The city is served by Logan International Airport, in the East Boston section. The American League's Red Sox play baseball in Fenway Park; the National Hockey League's Bruins and the National Basketball Association's Celtics also play in the city. The National Football League's Patriots play in suburban Foxboro.

History

Established by the elder John Winthrop in 1630 as the main settlement of the Massachusetts Bay Company, Boston was an early center of American Puritanism, with a vigorous, if theocratic, intellectual life. The nation's oldest public school, Boston Latin, was opened in 1635; Harvard, the nation's oldest college, was founded at Cambridge in 1636; a public library was started in 1653; and the first newspaper in the colonies, the Newsletter, appeared in 1704. With its excellent port, Boston held commercial ascendancy in colonial Massachusetts. As the American Revolution approached, it became a center of opposition to the British. The Battle of Bunker Hill, fought in Charlestown on June 17, 1775, was one of the first battles of the Revolution, and Boston was occupied until the British withdrew in Mar., 1776. After a short postwar depression, Boston entered a period of prosperity that lasted until the mid-19th cent. Its ships made Boston known around the world. Prominent families built substantial houses on Beacon Hill, later in the reclaimed Back Bay section, and patronized the arts and letters. Despite the generally conservative tone of their culture, they backed reformers, notably the abolitionists. The growth of industry in the mid 19th cent. brought many immigrants, and Boston changed from a commercial city of primarily British stock to a manufacturing center with an Irish majority, evolving gradually into the diverse, institutionally based city of today.

Bibliography

See W. M. Whitehill, Boston: A Topographical History (1959, rev. ed 1968); G. B. Warden, Boston, 1689–1776 (1970); G. Lewis and M. Conzen, Boston (1976); H. C. Binford, The First Suburbs (1988); C. F. Durang, Boston: A Brief History (1989); L. W. Kennedy, Planning the City upon a Hill (1992); R. Campbell and P. Vanderwarker, Cityscapes of Boston (1992).

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16 of the Best Books and Articles on: Boston History

as selected by Questia librarians

1.

A Municipal History of the Town and City of Boston during Two Centuries: From September 17, 1630, to September 17, 1830 (1852) » Read Now
by Josiah Quincy. 444 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

...A MUNICIPAL HISTORY OF THE TOWN AND CITY OF BOSTON, DURING TWO...IMPROVEMENT. MUNICIPAL HISTORY. CHAPTER...Organization of Boston -- General Proceedings...of the town of...
2.

Boston under Military Rule (1768-1769): As Revealed in a Journal of the Times (1936) » Read Now
by Oliver Morton Dickerson. 137 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

...The sending of troops to Boston was a most serious episode in the history of the empire. Nothing...either in his Memorial History of Boston or in his Narrative...Justin...
3.

The Boston Campaign: April 1775-March 1776 » Read Now
by Victor Brooks. 253 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

Drawing on memoirs, letters and detailed official documents, the author examines the struggle for Lexington and Concord and assesses the storming of Bunker Hill in the light of new evidence on this decisive confrontation.
4.

Yankee Destinies: The Lives of Ordinary Nineteenth-Century Bostonians » Read Now
by Peter R. Knights. 286 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

Yankee destinies reconstructs important milestones in the lives of 2,808 white, native-born men who resided in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1860 or 1870. Selected systematically from the census for those tow years, these men represent two cross-sections of those viewed by contemporaries as 'typical' Bostonians.
5.

John Nelson, Merchant Adventurer: A Life between Empires » Read Now
by Richard R. Johnson. 198 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

John Nelson was an entrepreneur born in the mid-seventeenth century--a man, in Richard Johnson's words, "operating ahead of the government and settled society from which he came," who "responded to conventions and conditions derived from several different and often competing cultures." For Nelson...
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John Nelson was an entrepreneur born in the mid-seventeenth century--a man, in Richard Johnson's words, "operating ahead of the government and settled society from which he came," who "responded to conventions and conditions derived from several different and often competing cultures." For Nelson, this meant trading out of Boston to the French and Indians of Canada, pursuing his family's dreams of the proprietorship of Nova Scotia, and promoting schemes of espionage and military conquest on both sides of the Atlantic. In the course of a long and adventurous life, Nelson served as middleman between Canada and New England; led an uprising that toppled the royal government of Massachusetts in 1689; and passed years in French prisons, including the Bastille, and then at court in London as a player in the complex European diplomacy of the time. Nelson's career reveals in bold colors the political and economic pressures exerted upon colonial America by the expansion and bitter conflict of European empires--he himself complained of being "crusht between the two Crownes." Yet it also shows how one man fashioned a life as "spy, speculator, multinational merchant, memorialist, politician, prisoner, parent, friend, and gentleman." Gracefully written and widely researched, the book is both a fine example of the new Atlantic history and a vivid recounting of the fortunes of an exceptional individual.
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6.

Commanding Boston's Irish Ninth: The Civil War Letters of Colonel Patrick R. Guiney, Ninth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry » Read Now
by Patrick R. Guiney, Christian G. Samito. 282 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

These are the collected Civil War letters of Patrick Robert Guiney, an Irish immigrant lawyer who volunteered for duty and rose to command the Ninth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment. An outspoken supporter of Lincoln and an opponent of slavery, Guiney was often criticized for his views by...
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These are the collected Civil War letters of Patrick Robert Guiney, an Irish immigrant lawyer who volunteered for duty and rose to command the Ninth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment. An outspoken supporter of Lincoln and an opponent of slavery, Guiney was often criticized for his views by other Irish-Americans, some of whom tried, in vain, to derail his rise to command. These letters reveal a deeply affectionate husband and father who was, at the same time, a brave soldier, disciplined commander, and devoted advocate of the causes for which he fought.
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7.

Boston, 1700-1980: The Evolution of Urban Politics » Read Now
by Ronald P. Formisano, Constance K. Burns. 296 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

...essays originated in the Boston Political History Project, which celebrated...Historians have not neglected Bostons political history, but they have tended to...change in...
8.

The Trials of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson's Boston » Read Now
by Albert J. Von Frank. 416 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

Before 1854, most Northerners managed to ignore the distant unpleasantness of slavery. But that year an escaped Virginia slave, Anthony Burns, was captured and brought to trial in Boston - and never again could Northerners look the other way. This is the story of Burns's trial and of how, arising in...
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Before 1854, most Northerners managed to ignore the distant unpleasantness of slavery. But that year an escaped Virginia slave, Anthony Burns, was captured and brought to trial in Boston - and never again could Northerners look the other way. This is the story of Burns's trial and of how, arising in abolitionist Boston just as the incendiary Kansas-Nebraska Act took effect, it revolutionized the moral and political climate in Massachusetts and sent shock waves through the nation. Albert J. von Frank introduces us to the individuals who contended over the fate of the barely literate twenty-year-old runaway slave - figures as famous as Richard Henry Dana Jr., the defense attorney; as colorful as Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Bronson Alcott, who led a mob against the courthouse where Burns was held; and as intriguing as Moncure Conway, the Virginia-born abolitionist who spied on Burns's master. Von Frank links the deeds and rhetoric surrounding the Burns case to New England Transcendentalism, principally that,of Ralph Waldo Emerson. His book is thus also a study of how ideas relate to social change, exemplified in the art and expression of Emerson, Henry Thoreau, Theodore Parker, Bronson Alcott, Walt Whitman, and others.
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9.

Strained Sisterhood: Gender and Class in the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society » Read Now
by Debra Gold Hansen. 236 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library
10.

Black Bostonians: Family Life and Community Struggle in the Antebellum North » Read Now
by James Horton Oliver, Lois E. Horton. 198 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

...community activism among Bostons free blacks. 7 Social history studies that argued...Museum of Afro-American History in Boston, made sources of the...advances in social...
11.

Boston against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s » Read Now
by Ronald P. Formisano. 323 pgs.

Collections: Education, Entire Library

...integration -- Massachusetts -- Boston -- History. 2. School integration -- Massachusetts -- Boston -- History. 3. Social classes -- Massachusetts -- Boston -- History. 4...
12.

Boston's Wayward Children: Social Services for Homeless Children, 1830-1930 » Read Now
by Peter C. Holloran. 338 pgs.

Collections: Entire Library

...Institutional care-- Massachusetts-- Boston--History. 2. Social work with children-- Massachusetts--Boston--History. 3. Abandoned children-- Services for--Massachusetts--...
13.

Separatism and Subculture: Boston Catholicism, 1900-1920 » Read Now
by Paula M. Kane. 415 pgs.

Collections: Religious Studies, History, Entire Library

Arguing that Catholicism was a central integrating force among different ethnic and class groups, Paula Kane explores the role of religious identity in Boston in the early twentieth century. In Separatism and Subculture she traces the effect of changing class status on religious identity and...
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Arguing that Catholicism was a central integrating force among different ethnic and class groups, Paula Kane explores the role of religious identity in Boston in the early twentieth century. In Separatism and Subculture she traces the effect of changing class status on religious identity and solidarity, and she delineates the social and cultural meaning of Catholicism in a city where Yankee Protestant nativism persisted even as its hegemony was in decline. While the Catholic Church served as a force for integration and acculturation in Boston, it also provided a distinct subculture for the city's Catholics in order to maintain its influence in the lives of the faithful. By the early twentieth century, Catholics had begun to achieve the economic success that was essential to cultural assimilation. But Church leaderswhile acknowledging the importance of this developmentnevertheless directed Catholics to reject secular modernity for the sanctity of the Church. To implement this strategy of separatist integration, clergy and laity coordinated existing charities, social services, and schools into a specifically Catholic refuge. New institutions emerged as well as did displays of Catholic identity such as parades, public forums, and proselytizing campaigns. Under Archbishop William O'Connell, the Church relied upon its dual insider-outsider image to unify the Catholic community and avert the contradictions of assimilation. These contradictions, says Kane, reflected Catholic ambivalence toward secular culture and concern over social and economic matters, including gender roles and feminism, capitalism, individualism, and the role of the state in philanthropy and social reform. In her analysisof Catholic lay experience, Kane makes use of a wide range of sources, from conversion narratives, fiction, and poetry to the voluminous outpourings of the Catholic press, and she juxtaposes Catholics' responses to various a
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14.

The Early Jewish Community of Boston's North End: A Sociologically Oriented Study of an Eastern European Jewish Immigrant Community in an American Big-City Neighborhood between 1870 and 1900 » Read Now
by Arnold A. Wieder. 100 pgs.

Collections: Religious Studies, History, Entire Library

...WIEDERS fascinating history of the early Jewish...the North End of Boston will appeal to several...this study is the history of the Eastern European...the North End in...
15.

Shaky Palaces: Homeownership and Social Mobility in Boston's Surburbanization » Read Now
by Matthew H. Edel, Elliott D. Sclar, Daniel D. Luria. 464 pgs.

Collections: Entire Library

...Housing-- Massachusetts--Boston Metropolitan Area-- History. 2. Real estate development...report here cover the entire history of Boston, but they focus on the...
16.

Women and the City: Gender, Space, and Power in Boston, 1870-1940 » Read Now
by Sarah Deutsch. 390 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

In the 70 years between the Civil War and World War II, the women of Boston changed the city dramatically. From anti-spitting campaigns and demands for police mothers to patrol local parks, to calls for a decent wage and living quarters, women rich and poor, white and black, immigrant and...
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In the 70 years between the Civil War and World War II, the women of Boston changed the city dramatically. From anti-spitting campaigns and demands for police mothers to patrol local parks, to calls for a decent wage and living quarters, women rich and poor, white and black, immigrant and native-born struggled to make a place for themselves in the city. Now, in Women and the City historian Sarah Deutsch tells this story for the first time, revealing how they changed not only the manners but also the physical layout of the modern city. Deutsch shows how the women of Boston turned the city from a place with no respectable public space for women, to a city where women sat on the City Council and met their beaux on the street corners. The book follows the efforts of working-class, middle-class, and elite matrons, working girls and "new women" as they struggled to shape the city in their own interests. And in fact they succeeded in breathtaking fashion, rearranging and redefining the moral geography of the city, and in so doing broadening the scope of their own opportunities. But Deutsch reveals that not all women shared equally in this new access to public space, and even those who did walk the streets with relative impunity and protested their wrongs in public, did so only through strategic and limited alliances with other women and with men. A penetrating new work by a brilliant young historian, Women and the City is the first book to analyze women's role in shaping the modern city. It casts new light not only on urban history, but also on women's domestic lives, women's organizations, labor organizing, and city politics, and on the crucial connections between gender, space, and power.
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