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Race and Class Matters at an Elite College
Elizabeth Aries
Temple University Press, 2008

In Race and Class Matters at an Elite College, Elizabeth Aries provides a rare glimpse into the challenges faced by black and white college students from widely different class backgrounds as they come to live together as freshmen. Based on an intensive study Aries conducted with 58 students at Amherst College during the 2005-2006 academic year, this book offers a uniquely personal look at the day-to-day thoughts and feelings of students as they experience racial and economic diversity firsthand, some for the first time.

Through online questionnaires and face-to-face interviews, Aries followed four groups of students throughout their first year of college: affluent whites, affluent blacks, less financially advantaged whites from families with more limited education, and less financially advantaged blacks from the same background. Drawing heavily on the voices of these freshmen, Aries chronicles what they learned from racial and class diversity—and what colleges might do to help their students learn more.

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Radicals of the Worst Sort
Laboring Women in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1860-1912
Ardis Cameron
University of Illinois Press, 1993
Ardis Cameron focuses on the textile workers' strikes of 1882 and 1912 in this examination of class and gender formation as drawn from the experience and language of the working-class neighborhoods of Lawrence, Massachusetts. Using the neighborhood perspective to explore the role of women in worker militancy, Cameron reveals the importance of female networks and organizational life in working-class culture and politics. Unionized women were labeled "radicals of the worst sort" because, in fighting for equality, they also rebelled against traditional economic and sexual hierarchies. Oral histories and detailed maps illuminate the setting and the dramatic story behind the famous Bread and Roses strike of 1912.
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Radio Free Boston
The Rise and Fall of WBCN
Carter Alan
University Press of New England, 2013
Blaring the Cream anthem “I Feel Free,” WBCN went on the air in March 1968 as an experiment in free-form rock on the fledgling FM radio band. It broadcast its final song, Pink Floyd’s “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” in August 2009. In between, WBCN became the musical, cultural, and political voice of the young people of Boston and New England, sustaining a vibrant local music scene that launched such artists as the J. Geils Band, Aerosmith, James Taylor, Boston, the Cars, and the Dropkick Murphys, as well as paving the way for Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, U2, and many others. Along the way, WBCN both pioneered and defined progressive rock radio, the dominant format for a generation of listeners. Brilliantly told by Carter Alan—and featuring the voices of station insiders and the artists they loved—Radio Free Boston is the story of a city; of artistic freedom, of music and politics and identity; and of the cultural, technological, and financial forces that killed rock radio.
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Ralph Adams Cram
An Architect's Four Quests
Douglass Shand-Tucci
University of Massachusetts Press, 2005
Following in the footsteps of Boston Bohemia, 1881–1900, Douglass Shand-Tucci's widely praised portrait of Ralph Adams Cram's early years, this volume tells the story of Cram's later career as one of America's leading cultural figures and most accomplished architects.

With his partner Bertram Goodhue, Cram won a number of important commissions, beginning with the West Point competition in 1903. Although an increasingly bitter rivalry with Goodhue would lead to the dissolution of their partnership in 1912, Cram had already begun to strike out on his own. Supervising architect at Princeton, consulting architect at Wellesley, and head of the MIT School of Architecture, he would also design most of New York's Cathedral of St. John the Divine and the campus of Rice University, as well as important church and collegiate structures throughout the country. By the 1920s Cram had become a household name, even appearing on the cover of Time magazine.

A complex man, Cram was a leading figure in what Shand-Tucci calls "a full-fledged homosexual monastery" in England, while at the same time married to Elizabeth Read. Their relationship was a complicated one, the effect of which on his children and his career is explored fully in this book. So too is his work as a religious leader and social theorist.

Shand-Tucci traces the influence on Cram of such disparate figures as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Phillips Brooks, Henry Adams, and Ayn Rand. He divides Cram's career into four lifelong "quests": medieval, modernist, American, and ecumenical. Some quests may have failed, but in each he left a considerable legacy, ultimately transforming the visual image of American Christianity in the twentieth century.

Handsomely illustrated with over 130 photographs and drawings and eight pages of color plates, Ralph Adams Cram can be read on its own or in conjunction with Boston Bohemia, 1881–1900. Together, the two volumes complete what the Christian Century has described as a "superbly researched and captivating biography."
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Rebels in Paradise
Sketches of Northampton Abolitionists
Bruce Laurie
University of Massachusetts Press, 2014
Long ago dubbed the "Paradise of America," Northampton, Massachusetts, is also known as the home of visionaries—from the Reverend Jonathan Edwards, father of the First Great Awakening, to George W. Benson, brother-in-law of William Lloyd Garrison and a founder of the utopian Northampton Association for Education and Industry. During the mid-nineteenth century the town became a center of political abolitionism and a hub in the Underground Railroad. In this book, Bruce Laurie profiles five rebellious figures who launched Northampton's abolitionist movement—Sylvester Judd Jr., John Payson Williston, David Ruggles, Henry Sherwood Gere, and Erastus Hopkins. Through their individual stories he traces the evolution of the antislavery movement in western Massachusetts and links it to broader developments in economics, civil life, and political affairs.

Northampton's abolitionists were a heterodox group, yet most were intrepid devotees of democracy and racial equality, idealists who enjoyed genuine friendships and political alliances with African Americans. Several even took the bold step of hiring African Americans in their businesses. They avoided the doctrinal rivalries that sometimes troubled the antislavery movement in other places, skillfully steering clear of the xenophobic nativism that infected Massachusetts politics in the mid–1850s and divided the Republican Party at large. Although a prohibitionist faction disrupted the Northampton abolitionist movement for a time, the leaders prevailed on the strength of their personal prestige and political experience, making the seat of Hampshire County what one of them called an abolitionist "stronghold."
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Reclaiming Public Housing
A Half Century of Struggle in Three Public Neighborhoods
Lawrence J. Vale
Harvard University Press, 2002

In Reclaiming Public Housing, Lawrence Vale explores the rise, fall, and redevelopment of three public housing projects in Boston. Vale looks at these projects from the perspectives of their low-income residents and assesses the contributions of the design professionals who helped to transform these once devastated places during the 1980s and 1990s.

The three similarly designed projects were built at the same time under the same government program and experienced similar declines. Each received comparable funding for redevelopment, and each design team consisted of first-rate professionals who responded with similar "defensible space" redesign plans. Why, then, was one redevelopment effort a nationally touted success story, another only a mixed success, and the third a widely acknowledged failure? The book answers this key question by situating each effort in the context of specific neighborhood struggles. In each case, battles over race and poverty played out somewhat differently, yielding wildly different results.

At a moment when local city officials throughout America are demolishing more than 100,000 units of low-income housing, this crucial book questions the conventional wisdom that all large public housing projects must be demolished and rebuilt as mixed-income neighborhoods.

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Regional Advantage
Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128
AnnaLee Saxenian
Harvard University Press, 1994
Why, in the ’90s, did business flourish in California’s Silicon Valley but decline along Route 128 in Massachusetts? The answer, Saxenian suggests, has to do with the fact that Silicon Valley developed a decentralized but cooperative industrial system while Route 128 came to be dominated by independent, self-sufficient corporations.
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Reinventing the Peabody Sisters
Monika M. Elbert
University of Iowa Press, 2006
Whether in the public realm as political activists, artists, teachers, biographers, editors, and writers or in the more traditional role of domestic, nurturing women, Elizabeth Peabody, Mary Peabody Mann, and Sophia Peabody Hawthorne subverted rigid nineteenth-century definitions of women’s limited realm of influence. Reinventing the Peabody Sisters seeks to redefine this dynamic trio’s relationship to the literary and political movements of the mid nineteenth century. Previous scholarship has romanticized, vilified, or altogether erased their influences and literary productions or viewed these individuals solely in light of their relationships to other nineteenth-century luminaries, particularly men---Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Horace Mann. This collection underscores that each woman was a creative force in her own right. Despite their differences and sibling conflicts, all three sisters thrived in the rarefied---if economically modest---atmosphere of a childhood household that glorified intellectual and artistic pursuits. This background allowed each woman to negotiate the nineteenth-century literary marketplace and in the process redefine its scope. Elizabeth, Mary, and Sophia remained linked throughout their lives, encouraging, complementing, and sometimes challenging each other’s endeavors while also contributing to each other’s literary work. The essays in this collection examine the sisters’ confrontations with and involvement in the intellectual movements and social conflicts of the nineteenth century, including Transcendentalism, the Civil War, the role of women, international issues, slavery, Native American rights, and parenting. Among the most revealing writings that the sisters left behind, however, are those which explore the interlaced relationship that continued throughout their remarkable lives.
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Remaking Boston
An Environmental History of the City and Its Surroundings
Anthony N. Penna
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009
Since its settlement in 1630, Boston, its harbor, and outlying regions have witnessed a monumental transformation at the hands of humans and by nature. Remaking Boston chronicles many of the events that altered the physical landscape of Boston, while also offering multidisciplinary perspectives on the environmental history of one of America's oldest and largest metropolitan areas.

Situated on an isthmus, and blessed with a natural deepwater harbor and ocean access, Boston became an important early trade hub with Europe and the world. As its population and economy grew, developers extended the city's shoreline into the surrounding tidal mudflats to create more useable land. Further expansion of the city was achieved through the annexation of surrounding communities, and the burgeoning population and economy spread to outlying areas. The interconnection of city and suburb opened the floodgates to increased commerce, services and workforces, while also leaving a wake of roads, rails, bridges, buildings, deforestation, and pollution.

Profiling this ever-changing environment, the contributors tackle a variety of topics, including: the glacial formation of the region; physical characteristics and composition of the land and harbor; dredging, sea walling, flattening, and landfill operations in the reshaping of the Shawmut Peninsula; the longstanding controversy over the link between landfills and shoaling in shipping channels; population movements between the city and suburbs and their environmental implications; interdependence of the city and its suburbs; preservation and reclamation of the Charles River; suburban deforestation and later reforestation as byproducts of changing land use; the planned outlay of parks and parkways; and historic climate changes and the human and biological adaptations to them.
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Remembering Ezra Vogel
Martin K. Whyte and Mary C. Brinton
Harvard University Press, 2022

Ezra F. Vogel (July 11, 1930–December 20, 2020) was one of America’s foremost experts on Asia, mastering the Japanese and Chinese languages and contributing important scholarly works on both countries, and on their relationships with each other and with the world. Starting from modest roots in an immigrant family in a small town in Ohio, he came to Harvard in 1953 to train as a sociologist. He then shifted his focus to Asia, spending almost the entirety of his life at Harvard.

Vogel had a dramatic impact around the world, not only through his scholarship and the students he trained, but also through his friendship and mentoring of journalists, diplomats, business executives, and foreign leaders as well as through his public policy advice and devotion to institution building, at Harvard as well as nationally and internationally. Active until the end, his sudden death provoked outpourings of gratitude and grief from countless people whose lives he had affected. The present volume, containing fond reminiscences from 155 diverse individuals, conveys what was so extraordinary about the character and life of Ezra Vogel.

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Rescuing Ellisville Marsh
The Long Fight to Restore Lost Connections
Eric P. Cody
University of Massachusetts Press, 2023

For hundreds of years, farmers and fishing communities maintained the inlet to Ellisville Marsh, a picturesque piece of coastline ten miles south of Plymouth, Massachusetts. Recognized as one of the most environmentally sensitive and ecologically valuable places in the state, the salt marsh and estuary are home to a diverse array of wildlife and a range of habitats, including low-tide mudflats, a saltwater pond, intertidal zone, and fields of tall marsh grass.

After agricultural and fishing activities faded away in the late twentieth century, it soon became apparent that protecting the marsh and its surroundings from development would not be enough to restore the natural equilibrium that had been lost when the inlet became blocked. Having witnessed government inaction over the years, Eric P. Cody and four other locals founded the Friends of Ellisville Marsh in 2007 to address erosion, revive tidal flows, and revitalize fisheries and wildlife in the face of climate change. Rescuing Ellisville Marsh presents the powerful case study of backyard activism, telling the story of a community that bonded with a natural place and decided to fight for it.

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Resisting Garbage
The Politics of Waste Management in American Cities
Lily Baum Pollans
University of Texas Press, 2021

Resisting Garbage presents a new approach to understanding practices of waste removal and recycling in American cities, one that is grounded in the close observation of case studies while being broadly applicable to many American cities today.

Most current waste practices in the United States, Lily Baum Pollans argues, prioritize sanitation and efficiency while allowing limited post-consumer recycling as a way to quell consumers’ environmental anxiety. After setting out the contours of this “weak recycling waste regime,” Pollans zooms in on the very different waste management stories of Seattle and Boston over the last forty years. While Boston’s local politics resulted in a waste-export program with minimal recycling, Seattle created new frameworks for thinking about consumption, disposal, and the roles that local governments and ordinary people can play as partners in a project of resource stewardship. By exploring how these two approaches have played out at the national level, Resisting Garbage provides new avenues for evaluating municipal action and fostering practices that will create environmentally meaningful change.

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Revolutionary Politics in Massachusetts
The Boston Committee of Correspondence and the Towns, 1772-1774
Richard D. Brown
Harvard University Press, 1970

More than a century and a half ago, John Adams urged scholars investigate the communications of the Boston Committee of Correspondence, the most radical and important of the revolutionary committees of correspondence. Such a study, Adams suggested, would reveal the underlying impetus of the revolutionary movement. Now, for the first time, Richard D. Brown has made an exhaustive and systematic analysis of the committee that set a pattern for America and for the world by keeping alive the revolutionary spirit at a time when the issues were cloudy and public interest was dormant.

The Boston committee, organized to arouse the people of Massachusetts and to inform them of their rights, initiated the use of local committees of correspondence and went on to become a major revolutionary institution which helped bring about fundamental changes in Massachusetts politics. Mr. Brown's book focuses on the years 1772 to 1774, when the inhabitants of Massachusetts moved from quiet accommodation with the British imperial system to massive rebellion against it. His investigations of the records of the Boston committee and of voluminous town records never before studied have resulted in a revision of previous interpretations regarding the interaction between leaders in Boston and the people in the towns.

The author's findings indicate that the Boston committee did not control Massachusetts political action, manipulating the political behavior of the towns, as earlier theorists have suggested. Though Boston was a leader, the towns generally acted independently, and government by consent developed effectively on the local level. The letters which passed between the capital and the countryside reveal an expanding political consciousness and an ever-increasing political sophistication at the grass-roots level. They articulate an essentially radical view of politics based on popular sovereignty.

As an account of the process of political integration among a colonial people engaged in an independence movement, this book will appeal not only to historians but also to political scientists concerned with the emerging nations of the twentieth century.

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The River Gods
Brian Kiteley
University of Alabama Press, 2009
The River Gods is a novel in fragments, a mix of fact and fiction, in which various inhabitants of the area around what is now Northampton, Massachusetts, from the eleventh century through the 1990s, speak of their lives and of the community, a place haunted by the pervasive melancholy of extinguished desire.

Each of the voices--including a character named Brian Kiteley and his family, the original Native American inhabitants, the actor Richard Burton, Sojourner Truth, Richard Nixon, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jonathan Edwards, and many nameless others--ruminate on a past that is startlingly present and tangible. The main character, though, is the world of Northampton, irrevocably woven into the fabric of Western history, yet still grounded by the everyday concerns of health, money, food, love, and family. It is a novel of voices, the living and the dead, that illuminate the passage of time.



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The Rock, the Curse, and the Hub
A Random History of Boston Sports
Randy Roberts
Harvard University Press, 2005

When you hear the words "Boston sports," does your mind flash to a place or to a person? Do you think of a fly ball arching over the Green Monster, a Celtic breaking across the parquet at Boston Garden, rowers skimming along the Charles River in autumn, or runners tackling the grueling stretch of "Heartbreak Hill" during the Boston Marathon? Or do you conjure faces--a smiling Babe Ruth, a bearded Bill Russell, a determined Rocky Marciano, a boyish and nimble Bobby Orr, or a defiant Pedro Martinez? Most likely, it is impossible to separate the two, impossible to imagine Bob Cousy on any court other than the Garden or Ted Williams playing at any field other than Fenway. Certain people and places are as inseparable as heads and tails on a penny.

The Rock, the Curse, and the Hub is a collection of original essays about the people and places that live in the minds and memories of Bostonians and all Americans. From the Boston of the young Bambino and even younger Francis Ouimet to the glories and agonies of 1986 and the struggles to keep the Patriots in town, each chapter focuses on the games and the athletes, but also on which sports have defined Boston and Bostonians. In a city of deep ethnic and class divisions, sports have provided a common ground, an intense shared experience. Pursuing the legend and the lore, these essays celebrate the players, the games, and the arenas that are at the heart of the city of Boston.

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Romance, Remedies, and Revolution
The Journal of Dr. Elihu Ashley of Deerfield, Massachusetts, 1773-1775
Amelia F. Miller
University of Massachusetts Press, 2007
Elihu Ashley (1750–1817) was a twenty-three-year-old medical apprentice in Deerfield, Massachusetts, when he began keeping a personal journal in March 1773. Over the next two-and-a-half years, he recorded, in clear and simple prose, just about everything he did and everyone he saw. Although carefully preserved, the journal was later suppressed by the town historian, presumably because he found some of the entries morally objectionable. Rediscovered by Amelia F. Miller, and coedited by Miller and A. R. Riggs, this document now appears in print for the first time, accompanied by related letters of Ashley's extended family as well as brief biographies of more than 750 people mentioned by the young doctor in his writings.

With flashes of humor and close attention to detail, Ashley describes a broad range of activities and experiences in the small village of Deerfield and the surrounding towns of the Connecticut River valley. Articulate as well as observant, this former schoolteacher conveys a sense of immediacy that brings even the most mundane daily events to life. He discusses medical theory and practice, revolutionary politics, farming, his family, his circle of friends, and amusements ranging from singing and dancing to sleigh riding and bouts of drunkenness. He also writes about his love life, including a dalliance with the older sister of his fiancee, Polly Williams, while the latter is away visiting relatives in the Berkshires.

For Ashley, personal relationships and politics were the prominent issues of 1773 and 1774, as events in Massachusetts drew the province toward rebellion. He discusses the gathering of angry mobs in response to the so-called Intolerable Acts, the stoppage of the courts in Hampshire County, the anarchy that ensued, and the persecution of loyalists, with or without the sanction of law. When the revolution breaks out in April 1775, he describes the departure of companies of minutemen as they set out for Boston to challenge the British Army.

Six months later, in November 1775, the journal abruptly ends. By then, however, Elihu Ashley had already bequeathed to posterity an extraordinary firsthand account of life in rural New England in the years immediately preceding the War of Independence.
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Run School Run
Roland Barth
Harvard University Press, 1980

Roland Barth believes that there is a way to create a school which, instead of insisting upon uniformity, builds upon diversity among students, teachers, and teaching styles. Unlike many educational theorists, Barth has had ample opportunity to test his beliefs during his many years as an elementary school principal. Run School Run is the chronicle of his theory in action, a nuts-and-bolts study of one school’s rocky but ultimately quite successful transition toward pluralist education.

For Barth, the case against an elementary education that is uniform in content and method is clear-cut: teacher abilities differ radically, and so do student needs. In the pluralist school, the problem is to find ways to put this variety to good use. Barth shows that the solution is essentially a matter of organization; he sets up a principal’s blueprint that offers teachers more control over curriculum content, teaching materials and methods, and composition of classes, in a way that ensures an educational coherence for each student.

Run School Run is a rich, readable account, a how-to book as well as a personal reminiscence on the initiation and administration of an environment in which teaching and learning are allowed to take on shapes of their own design.

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