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.

“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.

An analysis of the Irish community of city of Worcester, Massachusetts around the turn of the 20th century. The author reveals how an ethnic group can endure and yet change when its first American-born generation takes control of its destiny.