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In the 1920s and 1930s Boston became a rich and distinctive site of African American artistic production, unfolding at the same time as the Harlem Renaissance and encompassing literature, theater, music, and visual art. Owing to the ephemeral nature of much of this work, many of the era's primary sources have been lost.

In this book, Lorraine Elena Roses employs archival sources and personal interviews to recover this artistic output, examining the work of celebrated figures such as Dorothy West, Helene Johnson, Meta Warrick Fuller, and Allan Rohan Crite, as well as lesser-known artists including Eugene Gordon, Ralf Coleman, Gertrude “Toki” Schalk, and Alvira Hazzard. Black Bostonians and the Politics of Culture, 1920–1940 demonstrates how this creative community militated against the color line not solely through powerful acts of civil disobedience but also by way of a strong repertoire of artistic projects.

In the mid-nineteenth century, Boston fashioned itself as a global hub. By the early 1970s, it was barely a dot on the national picture. It had gained a reputation as a decaying city rife with crime and dysfunctional politics, as well as decidedly retrograde race relations, prominently exemplified by white resistance to school integration. Despite this historical ebb in its national and international presence, it still possessed the infrastructure—superb educational institutions such as Harvard and MIT, world-class sports teams like the Celtics and Red Sox, powerful media outlets like The Boston Globe, and extensive shipping capacity—required to eventually thrive in an age of global trade and mass communication.

In Boston Mass-Mediated, Stanley Corkin explores the power of mass media to define a place. He examines the tensions between the emergent and prosperous city of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and its representation in a range of media genres such as news journalism, professional sports broadcasting, and popular films like Mystic River and The Departed. This mass media, with its ever-increasing digital reach, has emphasized a city restricted by tropes suggestive of an earlier Boston—racism, white ethnic crime, Catholicism, and a pre-modern insularity—even as it becomes increasingly international and multicultural. These tropes mediate our understanding and experience of the city. Using Boston as a case study, Corkin contends that our contemporary sense of place occurs through a media saturated world, a world created by the explosion of digital technology that is steeped in preconceptions.

Hailed as one of Boston’s most beloved mayors and its longest serving, Thomas Menino (1942–2014) deftly managed the city’s finances and transformed Boston into the hub of innovation that it is today. During his time in office, Boston embraced modern industrial growth and moved forward with noteworthy developments that altered neighborhoods, while also facing ongoing racial strife, challenges of unaffordable housing, and significant public union negotiations.

Mayors in modern American cities occupy unique positions as government leaders who need to remain active parts of their communities in addition to being tasked with fixing neighborhood issues, managing crises, and keeping schools and public infrastructure on course. Situating news coverage alongside interviews with the mayor and his administration, political scientist Wilbur C. Rich chronicles Menino’s time in office while also considering his personal and professional background, his larger-than-life personality, and his ambitions. Menino’s approach to these challenges and opportunities offers enduring lessons to anyone interested in urban government and political leadership.

In the late twentieth century the American and global economy shifted from manufacturing toward a knowledge industry. Following an economic low point several decades earlier, the city of Boston took advantage of the new era of globalization, fueled by dramatic advances in telecommunications, computer power, and air and sea travel, as well as its own impressive intellectual capital.

Boston and the Making of a Global City pulls together scholarship, media stories, personal interviews, and city planning documents to tell the story of Boston’s historical trajectory, as it quickly became a competitive global hub. Starting with its role as a colonial port and nineteenth-century maritime power, but moving quickly forward, the book describes how Boston capitalized on its strengths in higher education and such innovation sectors as life sciences, healthcare, information technology, and finance. Author James O’Connell traces the historical sweep of global flows—trade and supply chains, innovation and the dissemination of knowledge, investment, transportation, tourism, telecommunications, and immigration—that have shaped the city and region’s development. This volume also addresses the economic, social, and environmental challenges that Boston currently faces and how it is strategically positioned to confront them going forward.

As Boston approaches its four-hundredth anniversary, it is remarkable that it still maintains its historic character despite constant development. The fifty buildings featured in this book all pre-date 1800 and illustrate Boston’s early history. This is the first book to survey Boston’s fifty oldest buildings and does so through an approachable narrative which will appeal to nonarchitects and those new to historic preservation. Beginning with a map of the buildings’ locations and an overview of the historic preservation movement in Boston, the book looks at the fifty buildings in order from oldest to most ­recent. Geographically, the majority of the buildings are located within the downtown area of Boston along the Freedom Trail and within easy walking distance from the core of the city. This makes the book an ideal guide for tourists, and residents of the city will also find it interesting as it includes numerous properties in the surrounding neighborhoods. The buildings span multiple uses from homes to churches and warehouses to restaurants. Each chapter features a building, a narrative focusing on its historical significance, and the efforts made to preserve it over time. Full ­color photos and historical drawings illustrate each building and area. Boston’s Oldest Buildings and Where to Find Them presents the ideals of historic preservation in an approachable and easy­-to-­read manner appropriate for the broadest audience. Perfect for history lovers, architectural enthusiasts, and tourists alike. 

“New England was founded consciously, and in no fit of absence of mind,” observed historian Samuel Eliot Morison on the establishment of the Bay Colony in 1630 on the narrow, mountainous Shawmut peninsula of what became Massachusetts. That self-conscious presence of mind has endured for four centuries. Boston has been shaped and sustained by observation, imagination, and interpretation. As a result, the evolving vision of Boston has yielded a compelling literary record.

In this wide-ranging anthology, Shaun O'Connell includes a generous sampling of those who have recorded, revised, and redefined the vision of Boston. Anne Bradstreet, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, W. E. B. Du Bois, Mary Antin, Edwin O'Connor, John Updike, and many others eloquently evoke and explain Boston in these pages. 

From John Winthrop's “city upon a hill” sermon, delivered aboard the Arbella before his followers landed in 1630 in the place they would call Boston, to Robert Lowell's “For the Union Dead,” a poem delivered in Boston's Public Garden in 1960, writers have continued to invoke the high purposes for which the city was founded, sometimes in praise of the city, but often in what Robert Frost named a “lover's quarrel,” in works that called attention to the city's failures to fulfill its promises. In the twenty-first century some writers continue to celebrate or to castigate the city, while others look back to Boston's origins to reassess its founders and renew its covenant of high purpose.

This is an interpretive anthology—one that includes commentary as well as writings. Section introductions provide historical and biographical context, offer analysis that stresses the thematic relevance of each selection, and explore the pattern of their relations. Rather than present a random array of writers who happen to have been Greater Bostonians, O'Connell focuses on those authors who possessed a commitment to the sense of place, those who addressed Boston not only as a geographical, social, and political entity but as an image, idea, and site of symbolic values.

In Massachusetts, the Latino population increased by 475 percent between 1980 and 2017, marking a dramatic growth. This diverse ethnic community of Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Salvadoreans, Colombians, Brazilians, and more also contains a wide range of cultures, immigration and migration experiences, languages, and socio-political backgrounds. However, there are numerous commonalities involving education. Recent research at the Mauricio Gastón Institute for Latino Community Development and Policy reveals that Latino students in Massachusetts are more likely to attend public schools, in communities with significant academic achievement and opportunity gaps as well as other challenges, from food scarcity to higher rates of unemployment. At the same time, the state-wide shift to standards-based education has had a disproportionately negative impact on Latino students, who already feel the effects of politically motivated anti-immigrant policies and laws that limit bilingual education.

This collection of essays, from those working inside the classroom as well as researchers taking a broader look at policy, addresses the array of issues facing Latino students in Massachusetts. These perspectives paint a complex picture of the educational experience for Latinos, and offer expert suggestions for improving classrooms, school environments, and ultimate educational outcomes for an important growing demographic in the Commonwealth.

In addition to editors Lorna Rivera and Melissa Colón, this volume’s contributors include Almudena G. Abeyta, Nasteho Ali, Cristina Araujo Brinkerhoff, Michael Berardino, Alex Briesacher, Thomas Conroy, Judenie Dabel, Liya Escalera, Luis Enrique Esquivel, Deyja Enriquez, Isahiah Erilus, Nyal Fuentes, Jazmin Rubi Flete Gomez, Manuel Frau-Ramos, Kimberly A. S. Howard, Patricia Krueger-Henney, Steven Lue, Mary Jo Marion, Timothy E. Murphy, Cecilia Nardi, Laurie Occhipinti, Alexandra Oliver-Davila, Chong Myung Park, Angelica Rodriquez, Marta T. Rosa, Diana Santiago, Melissa Sargent, Ester Shapiro, V. Scott H. Solberg, Fabián Torres-Ardila, Ashley Torres Carrasquillo, Paul Trunfio, Carmen N. Veloria, and Heilam Xie.

Honorable Mention, 2025 North American Society for Sport History Book Award

On Boston Common stands a monument dedicated to the Oneida Football Club. It honors the site where, in the 1860s, sixteen boys played what was then called the “Boston game”—an early version of football in the United States. The boys were largely the sons of upper-class Boston Brahmins, and they lived through the transformative periods of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Gilded Age. Later as they grew old, in the 1920s, a handful of them orchestrated a series of commemorative events about their boyhood game. Benefitting from elite networks developed through the city’s social and educational institutions, including Harvard University, they donated artifacts (such as an oddly shaped, battered black ball) to museums, deposited self-penned histories into libraries and archives, and erected bronze and stone memorials, all to elevate themselves as the inventors of American football (and later, by extension, soccer). But was this origin story of what, by then, had become one of America’s favorite games as straightforward as they made it seem or a myth-making hoax?

In Inventing the Boston Game, Kevin Tallec Marston and Mike Cronin investigate the history of the Oneida Football Club and reveal what really happened. In a compelling, well told narrative that is informed by sports history, Boston history, and the study of memory, they posit that these men engaged in self-memorialization to reinforce their elite cultural status during a period of tremendous social and economic change, and particularly increased immigration. This exploration of the Club’s history provides fascinating insight into how and why origin stories are created in the first place. 

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.

A cultural history of race, resistance, and representation in a city divided by politics and play

When outfielder Bernie Carbo joined the Red Sox in 1974, he brought with him a toy gorilla named Mighty Joe Young that became the team’s unofficial mascot for several players and many in the local press. This seemingly innocent stuffed animal was introduced within a baseball team notorious for its stubborn discrimination, and during a particularly fraught era of racial discord in Boston. That June, after years of activism from the city’s Black community, Judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr. ruled that Boston must address the segregation of its schools through redistricting and busing. The ensuing racial animus to these policies led some of the city’s white residents to throw bananas and chant monkey sounds at African American students as they integrated the predominantly white South Boston High School. In this agitated atmosphere, cultural symbols like the Red Sox’s Mighty Joe Young mirrored and amplified the heightened racial tensions of Boston’s busing crisis.

Situated at the intersection of US cultural and social history, Segregation Games examines the surprising ties in 1970s Boston between the racial segregation of the city’s schools and the racial controversies expressed on and off the field of “Red Sox Nation.” “I found out in the black community why they don’t come out [to Fenway Park],” explained Black player Reggie Smith of his experiences with the Red Sox and the city during this period. “The team was the last to get Black players, and some of the things I hear out in the stands make me sick.” To understand these connections, Faflik erases the lines between politics and sport, which routinely blurred in a city suffused with an anti-Black racism that was both deceptively subtle and fiercely overt.

Drawing upon deep archival research from sources that have largely been ignored, such as the Black press of the time, Faflik offers a carefully nuanced portrait of Boston’s cultural life at a pivotal moment in the city’s history. 

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.