Boston National Historical Park is one of America's most popular
heritage destinations, drawing in millions of visitors annually.
Tourists flock there to see the site of the Boston Massacre, to
...relive Paul Revere's midnight ride, and to board Old
Ironsides -all of these bound together by the iconic Freedom
Trail, which traces the city's revolutionary saga. Making sense of
the Revolution, however, was never the primary aim for the planners
who reimagined Boston's heritage landscape after the Second World
War. Seth C. Bruggeman demonstrates that the Freedom Trail was
always largely a tourist gimmick, devised to lure affluent white
Americans into downtown revival schemes, its success hinging on a
narrow vision of the city's history run through with old stories
about heroic white men. When Congress pressured the National Park
Service to create this historical park for the nation's
bicentennial celebration in 1976, these ideas seeped into its
organizational logic, precluding the possibility that history might
prevail over gentrification and profit.
Media in Motion Eide, Elisabeth; Nikunen, Kaarina
2011, 20160429, 2010, 2016-04-29, 2011-01-01, 20110101
eBook
Owing to increased migration dating from the 1990s, Nordic countries have gone through substantial cultural and social changes, resulting in increased debate surrounding the politics of ...multiculturalism. One of the central realms of the discussion around multiculturalism in the Nordic region concerns the media, which is considered to be a vital factor in the construction of society's values, as well as an essential tool in the integration process of migrants, providing as it does a symbolic arena for learning about and becoming part of society. This collection draws together the latest research from Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden to look at different aspects of the relationship between media and migration in the Nordic region. Exploring the role played by the media in nation building and the power of the media in the definition of who 'belongs' in society, Media in Motion examines the practices of inclusion and exclusion that characterise mainstream media representations. The book also examines the manner in which recent technological changes suggest the emergence of a transnational and cosmopolitan media landscape; a space which blurs the boundaries of the national and transnational, as well as between the public and the private, with significant implications for the ways migrants may take and become part of society. As such, it will be of interest to those working in the fields of media, race and ethnicity, colonialism and postcolonial studies, and migration.
Progressivism, Connolly argues, was a form of political action available to a range of individuals and groups. In showing that the reform visions arising in Boston included not only the progressivism ...of its business leaders but also a series of ethnic progressivisms, Connolly offers a new approach to urban public life in the early 20th century.
Lost Wonderland Wilk, Stephen R; Wilk, Stephen
10/2020
eBook
If you take Boston's Blue Line to its northern end, you'll reach the Wonderland stop. Few realize that a twenty-three-acre amusement park once sat nearby-the largest in New England, and grander than ...any of the Coney Island parks that inspired it. Opened in Revere on Memorial Day in 1906 to great fanfare, Wonderland offered hundreds of thousands of visitors recreation by the sea, just a short distance from downtown Boston. The story of the park's creation and wild, but brief, success is full of larger-than-life characters who hoped to thrill attendees and rake in profits. Stephen R. Wilk describes the planning and history of the park, which featured early roller coasters, a scenic railway, a central lagoon in which a Shoot-the-Chutes boat plunged, an aerial swing, a funhouse, and more. Performances ran throughout the day, including a daring Fires and Flames show; a Wild West show; a children's theater; and numerous circus acts. While nothing remains of what was once called "Boston's Regal Home of Pleasure" and the park would close in 1910, this book resurrects Wonderland by transporting readers through its magical gates.
In colonial America, the system of "warning out" was distinctive to New England, a way for a community to regulate those to whom it would extend welfare.Robert Love's Warningsanimates this nearly ...forgotten aspect of colonial life, richly detailing the moral and legal basis of the practice and the religious and humanistic vision of those who enforced it.Historians Cornelia H. Dayton and Sharon V. Salinger follow one otherwise obscure town clerk, Robert Love, as he walked through Boston's streets to tell sojourners, "in His Majesty's Name," that they were warned to depart the town in fourteen days. This declaration meant not that newcomers literally had to leave, but that they could not claim legal settlement or rely on town poor relief. Warned youths and adults could reside, work, marry, or buy a house in the city. If they became needy, their relief was paid for by the province treasurer. Warning thus functioned as a registration system, encouraging the flow of labor and protecting town coffers.Between 1765 and 1774, Robert Love warned four thousand itinerants, including youthful migrant workers, demobilized British soldiers, recently exiled Acadians, and women following the redcoats who occupied Boston in 1768. Appointed warner at age sixty-eight owing to his unusual capacity for remembering faces, Love kept meticulous records of the sojourners he spoke to, including where they lodged and whether they were lame, ragged, drunk, impudent, homeless, or begging. Through these documents, Dayton and Salinger reconstruct the biographies of travelers, exploring why so many people were on the move throughout the British Atlantic and why they came to Boston. With a fresh interpretation of the role that warning played in Boston's civic structure and street life,Robert Love's Warningsreveals the complex legal, social, and political landscape of New England in the decade before the Revolution.
From the 1950s to the end of the twentieth century, Boston transformed from a city in freefall into a thriving metropolis, as modern glass skyscrapers sprouted up in the midst of iconic brick ...rowhouses. After decades of corruption and graft, a new generation of politicians swept into office, seeking to revitalize Boston through large-scale urban renewal projects. The most important of these was a new city hall, which they hoped would project a bold vision of civic participation. The massive Brutalist building that was unveiled in 1962 stands apart -- emblematic of the city's rebirth through avant-garde design.
And yet Boston City Hall frequently ranks among the country's ugliest buildings. Concrete Changes seeks to answer a common question for contemporary viewers: How did this happen? In a lively narrative filled with big personalities and newspaper accounts, Brian M. Sirman argues that this structure is more than a symbol of Boston's modernization; it acted as a catalyst for political, social, and economic change.
Ms. Donna Haskins is an African American woman who wrestles with
structural inequity in the streets of Boston by inhabiting an
alternate dimension she refers to as the "spirit realm." In this
other ...place, she is prepared by the Holy Spirit to challenge the
restrictions placed upon Black female bodies in the United States.
Growing into her spiritual gifts of astral flight and time travel,
Donna meets the spirits of enslaved Africans, conducts spiritual
warfare against sexual predators, and tends to the souls of
murdered Black children whose ghosts haunt the inner city. Take
Back What the Devil Stole centers Donna's encounters with the
supernatural to offer a powerful narrative of how one woman seeks
to reclaim her power from a lifetime of social violence. Both
ethnographic and personal, Onaje X. O. Woodbine's portrait of her
spiritual life sheds new light on the complexities of Black women's
religious participation and the lived religion of the dispossessed.
Woodbine explores Donna's religious creativity and her sense of
multireligious belonging as she blends together Catholic,
Afro-Caribbean, and Black Baptist traditions. Through the gripping
story of one local prophet, this book offers a deeply original
account of the religious experiences of Black women in contemporary
America: their bodies, their haunted landscapes, and their
spiritual worlds.
Comparing Media Systems Beyond the Western World offers a broad exploration of the conceptual foundations for comparative analysis of media and politics globally. It takes as its point of departure ...the widely used framework of Hallin and Mancini's Comparing Media Systems, exploring how the concepts and methods of their analysis do and do not prove useful when applied beyond the original focus of their 'most similar systems' design and the West European and North American cases it encompassed. It is intended both to use a wider range of cases to interrogate and clarify the conceptual framework of Comparing Media Systems and to propose new models, concepts and approaches that will be useful for dealing with non-Western media systems and with processes of political transition. Comparing Media Systems Beyond the Western World covers, among other cases, Brazil, China, Israel, Lebanon, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and Thailand.
As a poet, author, and keen observer of life in 1870s Boston, Harriet Robinson played an essential-if occasionally underappreciated-role in the women's suffrage movement during Boston's golden age. ...Robinson flourished after leaving behind her humble roots in the mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts, deciding to spend a year in Boston discovering the culture and politics of America's Athens. An honest, bright, and perceptive witness, she meets with Emerson and Julia Ward Howe, with whom she organizes the New England Women's Club, and drinks deeply of the city's artistic and cultural offerings. Noted historian Claudia L. Bushman proves a wonderful guide as she weaves together Robinson's journal entries, her own learned commentary, and selections from other nineteenth-century writers to reveal the impact of the industrial revolution and the rise of women's suffrage as seen through the experience of one articulate, engaged participant. Going to Boston will appeal to readers interested in both the history of Boston and the history of American progress itself.
At the end of the nineteenth century, cycling's popularity surged in the Boston area, but by 1900, the trend faded. Within the next few decades, automobiles became commonplace and roads were ...refashioned to serve them. Lorenz J. Finison argues that bicycling witnessed a renaissance in the 1970s as concerns over physical and environmental health coalesced. Whether cyclists hit the roads on their way to work or to work out, went off-road in the mountains or to race via cyclocross and BMX, or took part in charity rides, biking was back in a major way.
Finison traces the city's cycling history, chronicling the activities of environmental and social justice activists, stories of women breaking into male-dominated professions by becoming bike messengers and mechanics, and challenges faced by African American cyclists. Making use of newspaper archives, newly discovered records of local biking organizations, and interviews with Boston-area bicyclists and bike builders, Boston's TwentiethCentury Bicycling Renaissance brings these voices and battles back to life.
