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Many people are generally familiar with the fact that Boston was once known as “the Athens of America.” Very few, however, are clear about exactly why, except for their recollections of the famous writers and poets who gave the city a reputation for literature and learning.

In this book, historian Thomas H. O'Connor sets the matter straight by showing that Boston's eminence during the first half of the nineteenth century was the result of a much broader community effort. After the nation emerged from its successful struggle for independence, most Bostonians visualized their city not only as the Cradle of Liberty, but also as the new world's Cradle of Civilization. 

According to O'Connor, a leadership elite, composed of men of prominent family background, Unitarian beliefs, liberal education, and managerial experience in a variety of enterprises, used their personal talents and substantial financial resources to promote the cultural, intellectual, and humanitarian interests of Boston to the point where it would be the envy of the nation. Not only did writers, scholars, and philosophers see themselves as part of this process, but so did physicians and lawyers, ministers and teachers, merchants and businessmen, mechanics and artisans, all involved in creating a well-ordered city whose citizens would be committed to the ideals of social progress and personal perfectibility. 

To accomplish their noble vision, leading members of the Boston community joined in programs designed to cleanse the old town of what they felt were generations of accumulated social stains and human failures, and then to create new programs and more efficient institutions that would raise the cultural and intellectual standards of all its citizens. Like ancient Athens, Boston would be a city of great statesmen, wealthy patrons, inspiring artists, and profound thinkers, headed by members of the “happy and respectable classes” who would assume responsibility for the safety, welfare, and education of the “less prosperous portions of the community.”

Designed for the general reader and the historical enthusiast, The Athens of America is an interpretive synthesis that explores the numerous secondary sources that have concentrated on individual subjects and personalities, and draws their various conclusions into a single comprehensive narrative.

How immigrants helped rebuild a city—and redefined what it means to be American

Among the most consequential pieces of Great Society legislation, the Immigration Act of 1965 opened the nation's doors to large-scale immigration from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. A half century later, the impact of the "new immigration" is evident in the transformation of the country's demographics, economy, politics, and culture, particularly in urban America.

In The New Bostonians, Marilynn S. Johnson examines the historical confluence of recent immigration and urban transformation in greater Boston, a region that underwent dramatic decline after World War II. Since the 1980s, the Boston area has experienced an astounding renaissance—a development, she argues, to which immigrants have contributed in numerous ways. From 1970 to 2010, the percentage of foreign-born residents of the city more than doubled, representing far more diversity than earlier waves of immigration. Like the older Irish, Italian, and other European immigrant groups whose labor once powered the region's industrial economy, these newer migrants have been crucial in re-building the population, labor force, and metropolitan landscape of the New Boston, although the fruits of the new prosperity have not been equally shared.

Interweaves the stories of a revolutionary and a bombing victim to explore the roots and unintended consequences of political violence.

1976. The Vietnam War had ended, but radical political groups still operated clandestinely throughout the United States. Nowhere was the threat of civil unrest greater than in Boston. Racial tensions had been building since a federal judge ordered the desegregation of the Boston Public Schools, and civic leaders were counting on the pageantry of the nation’s Bicentennial to boost both tourism and investment. In April, the Sam Melville-Jonathan Jackson Unit, prison reformers schooled in Marxism and angered by US interventions abroad, bombed the Suffolk County Courthouse, injuring twenty-two people. The site of the blast marked the spot where the lives of two men intersected: a mill town kid who’d been radicalized in Vietnam and prison, and an immigrant waiting in line because he needed to renew a cab license.

Fifty years after the bombing shook the city, Troubled Times tells the story of lives changed by political violence at a time when the American experiment is again in crisis.