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.
An engaging yet objective look at the 350-year old history of "Southie," a neighborhood that has survived largely unchanged since the early days of immigrant Irish families and old-time political ...bosses. Originally published by Quinlan Press in 1988 and reprinted by Northeastern University Press in 1994. With a new foreword by Lawrence W. Kennedy.
In Eden on the Charles: The Making of Boston, Michael Rawson examines how the city's relationship with its natural surroundings informed its early growth and development. His compelling, ...well-researched narrative touches on several milestones on Boston's road to modernity, including the Common's conversion from a place of labor to a place of leisure, the emergence of pastoral suburbs as a respite from an increasingly urbanized landscape, and the long fight over a proposed municipal water system to bring fresh water to those who needed it most...Perhaps the book's most important lesson comes from a frustrated mariner who, upset over the maltreatment of the harbor, laments that "the past seems to be forgotten, the present only is regarded as of importance, and a veil is drawn over the future." Eden on the Charles is a valiant effort to combat such shortsightedness, reminding us that the key to building a successful community lies in respecting the natural resources that provide for it and in understanding our responsibility to our fellow citizens.
South End Shout: Boston’s Forgotten Music Scene in the Jazz Age details the power of music in the city’s African American community, spotlighting the era of ragtime culture in the early 1900s to the ...rise of big band orchestras in the 1930s. This story is deeply embedded in the larger social condition of Black Bostonians and the account is brought to life by the addition of 20 illustrations of musicians, theaters, dance halls, phonographs, and radios used to enjoy the music. South End Shout is part of an emerging field of studies that examines jazz culture outside of the major centers of music production. In extensive detail, author Roger R. House covers the activities of jazz musicians, jazz bands, the places they played, the relationships between Black and white musicians, the segregated local branches of the American Federation of Musicians (AFL-CIO), and the economics of Boston’s music industry. Readers will be captivated by the inclusion of vintage local newspaper reports, classified advertisements, and details of hard-to-access oral history accounts by musicians and residents. These precious documentary materials help to understand how jazz culture evolved as a Boston art form and contributed to the national art form between the world wars. With this book, House makes an important contribution to American studies and jazz history. Scholars and general readers alike who are interested in jazz and jazz culture, the history of Boston and its Black culture, and 20th century American and urban studies will be enlightened and delighted by this book.
A bustling commercial center and favorite tourist attraction on Boston's historic waterfront, Quincy Market, the popular name for Faneuil Hall Marketplace, draws throngs of visitors to the ...magnificent granite buildings and cobblestone concourses that house the area's specialty shops, restaurants, boutiques, pushcarts, and food stalls. Yet few are aware of the history of this legendary public place and its importance in the history of Boston and the nation. In this elegantly written and lavishly illustrated work, John Quincy, Jr., tells the absorbing story of the Market's unique evolution over the centuries. Beginning with John Winthrop's landing at the Great Cove on the Shawmut Peninsula in 1630, Quincy weaves together a remarkable tapestry of the district's rise, fall, and rebirth. Originally published by Northeastern University Press in 2003. With a new foreword by Hillary Corbett.
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.
In 1983, Boston and Chicago elected progressive mayors with deep roots among community activists. Taking office as the Reagan administration was withdrawing federal aid from local governments, ...Boston's Raymond Flynn and Chicago's Harold Washington implemented major policies that would outlast them. More than reforming governments, they changed the substance of what the government was trying to do: above all, to effect a measure of redistribution of resources to the cities' poor and working classes and away from hollow goals of growth as measured by the accumulation of skyscrapers. In Boston, Flynn moderated an office development boom while securing millions of dollars for affordable housing. In Chicago, Washington implemented concrete measures to save manufacturing jobs, against the tide of national policy and trends.
Activists in City Hall examines how both mayors achieved their objectives by incorporating neighborhood activists as a new organizational force in devising, debating, implementing, and shaping policy. Based in extensive archival research enriched by details and insights gleaned from hours of interviews with key figures in each administration and each city's activist community, Pierre Clavel argues that key to the success of each mayor were numerous factors: productive contacts between city hall and neighborhood activists, strong social bases for their agendas, administrative innovations, and alternative visions of the city. Comparing the experiences of Boston and Chicago with those of other contemporary progressive cities-Hartford, Berkeley, Madison, Santa Cruz, Santa Monica, Burlington, and San Francisco- Activists in City Hall provides a new account of progressive urban politics during the Reagan era and offers many valuable lessons for policymakers, city planners, and progressive political activists.
One of the more welcome changes in Boston's urban landscape has been the recent transformation of abandoned lots in to flourishing community gardens. In To Dwell Is to Garden, a distinguished scholar ...and a veteran photographer join forces to provide a history and a celebration of these urban oases and of the people who have made them possible. Sam Bass Warner, Jr., traces the origins of Boston's urban community gardens back to the English allotment gardens created to keep country folk from starving during the first great wave of urbanization. Warner suggests that today's urban community gardens owe their existence not to philanthropy or patriotism but to an activist impulse stemming from the civil rights movement, which emphasized self-help, local autonomy, and personal dignity to combat the problems of urban decay. The spirit of today's urban community gardens is captured in Hansi Durlach's compelling photographs of those individuals, young and old, who have worked together to clear the rubble and till the soil. From China and Chile, from Italy and Arkansas, from the suburbs and from next door, their comments, recorded by Durlach, linger in the mind and in the heart. Originally pubished by Northeastern University Press in 1987. With a new foreword by Jill Eshelman.
From the food uprisings in the early 1700s to the notorious anti-busing riots in the mid-1970s, incidents of communal social violence have played a significant role in Boston's history. This vivid ...portrait of an ever-changing community over time provides a revealing glimpse into peoples' anger, aspirations, and frustrations. It sheds new light on why groups are provoked to take unlawful action in response to unjust conditions, and it opens a fresh vista on the social history of Boston. Originally published by Northeastern University Press in 2001. With a new foreword by Gordana Rabrenovic.
Can't catch a break Sered, Susan Starr; Norton-Hawk, Maureen
2014., 20140912, 2014, 2014-09-12
eBook
Based on five years of fieldwork in Boston, Can't Catch a Break documents the day-to-day lives of forty women as they struggle to survive sexual abuse, violent communities, ineffective social and ...therapeutic programs, discriminatory local and federal policies, criminalization, incarceration, and a broad cultural consensus that views suffering as a consequence of personal flaws and bad choices. Combining hard-hitting policy analysis with an intimate account of how marginalized women navigate an unforgiving world, Susan Sered and Maureen Norton-Hawk shine new light on the deep and complex connections between suffering and social inequality.
