Captive Histories: English, French, and Native Narratives of the 1704 Deerfield Raid

Abstract

The Athens of America: Boston 1825-1845. By Thomas O'Connor. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 2007. 240 pp. illus. $22.95 The name Thomas O'Connor and the history of Boston are virtually synonymous in the minds of many readers. His first book on the Boston story, Bibles, Brahmins and Bosses, and his most recent are the bookends of an impressive body of scholarly work. It is appropriate, then, that The Athens of America: Boston 1825-1845 is not only a culmination of this wide-ranging knowledge but is also one of the best, if not the best, works that Professor O'Connor has produced on the city and its history. O'Connor points out that previous efforts to describe Boston during this period have focused on writers and philosophers, obscuring the role of the larger community in creating a new city. A leadership elite known as the "Boston Associates" championed this movement by using their personal talents and wealth to "promote the cultural, intellectual, and humanitarian interests of Boston to the point where it would be the envy of the nation" (p. xii). Like Athens, a group of statesmen, artists, thinkers, and wealthy patrons all contributed to the New Boston. With industrialization came investment in banking, railroads, and other industries, and this new wealth was a driving force behind the Boston Associates. When Boston's national political figures, chiefly represented by John Quincy Adams, failed to stem me growth of Jacksonian populism, the Associates turned their attention toward improving "their" city, with the goal of making it the "City Upon a Hill" once again. These improvements began by moving Boston from colonial town to new city through the reorganization of its government. Leaders such as Boston's first mayor, Josiah Quincy, and reformers among die Associates transformed marketplaces, prisons and punishment, health care, and aid to the poor, to name just a few topics that O'Connor chronicles. In describing these reforms, O'Connor's extraordinary gifts as a writer and historian become clear: the new role of women in dealing with the "female poor," the role of public drinking in inspiring not only stronger police and fire departments but also temperance movements, and the contributions of leading citizens like Dorothea Dix. All are told with lively energy. In moving our attention to the community at large, O'Connor does not ignore the role of the city's leading writers and philosophers. As members of an intellectual movement he describes as the "Grecian Model," O'Connor gives proper perspective to their contributions. …