Historical journal of Massachusetts最新文献

{"title":"The \"Infamas Govener\": Francis Bernard and the Origins of the American Revolution","authors":"R. Bloomberg","doi":"10.5860/choice.38-6399","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.38-6399","url":null,"abstract":"The \"Infamas GovenerFrancis Bernard and the Origins of the American Revolution. Colin Nicolson. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 2001. 326 pages. $24.00 (hardcover).Francis Bernard served as royal governor of Massachusetts from 1760 to 1769, playing a pivotal role during the years leading up to the Revolution. Colin Nicolson, the editor of the six volumes of Bernard's correspondence and lecturer at the University of Sterling, Scotland, portrays Bernard as an imperial reformer, \"caught in the crossfire between Britain and the colonies\" (5). Rather than being a tyrant, as his opponents demonized him, he was, according to Nicolson, guilty of underestimating the strength of the revolutionary movement. He was too intent on rigidly upholding the supremacy of Parliament and unwilling to bend even the slightest in the winds of political radicalism. Nicolson argues that Bernard's reports on the political conditions in Massachusetts significantly influenced, if not determined, the policies and actions of the British government toward Massachusetts.Nicolson's meticulously and richly researched political biography emphasizes Bernard's failure to reconcile his loyalty to the British crown with the realities of colonial governance in the 1760s. Bernard sincerely believed that the cure for the antipathies to British rule in Massachusetts could be achieved by strengthening and enforcing the authority of royal officials, by reason if possible, by force if necessary. Nicolson points out that Bernard was tactless in his defense of imperial rule. He specifically asserts that Bernard did not panic in the face of what he viewed as increasing colonial violence. But Nicolson's evidence, drawn heavily from Bernard's correspondence, shows the contrary. Bernard also was unable to convince the \"friends of [royal] government\" who were the \"mainstay of antirevolutionary sentiment in Massachusetts\" to support him (112).Bernard served as Governor of the New Jersey province from 17581760. He had early success in resolving the competing demands of London policymakers and vested interests in that province. However, he could not negotiate the more complicated political terrain in the more radical Massachusetts. The Stamp Act riots in Boston appear to be a turning point. According to Nicolson:What Bernard witnessed in August 1765 never left him: his impressionistic accounts of an unstable polity struggling to realize ill-informed directives from London was the single, enduring message in his official correspondence for years to come. Henceforth, Bernard was preoccupied with recovering his dignity and exposing those whom he believed were conspiring against royal government (123).Bernard became a prime target of the radicals' increasing opposition to the Townshend Acts of 1767. The colony's House of Representatives censured Bernard in 1767 and, in the following year, approved a petition calling for his dismissal. The Whigs, led by James Otis and Samuel Adams, focused their p","PeriodicalId":81429,"journal":{"name":"Historical journal of Massachusetts","volume":"44 1","pages":"178"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71087137","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Frederic Crowninshield: A Renaissance Man in the Gilded Age","authors":"Gregory J. Dehler","doi":"10.5860/choice.49-0078","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.49-0078","url":null,"abstract":"Frederic Crowninshield: A Renaissance Man in the Gilded Age. Gertrude De G. Wilmers and Julie L. Sloan. Amherst, MA, and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010. 352 pages. $39.95 (hardcover).In 1860, historian Jacob Burckhardt popularized the term \"Renaissance\" to describe the late Middle Ages period in Italy during which the greatest artists of Western Civilization flourished. In the years following Burckhardt's novel historiography, American artists trained in France and Italy, like Massachusetts-born Frederic Crowninshield, ushered in a renaissance of their own in the United States. In a fashion similar to its predecessor, artistic creativity, innovative techniques, and money generated from commercial expansion fueled the American version. The heir to old wealth, Crowninshield deplored the crass materialism of the nouveau riche robber barons who funded much of the art produced in the late nineteenth century, but he also believed that his work would inspire both his wealthy patrons and the common workingman with an appreciation of the more surreal and beautiful things in life that could not be assigned a cash value.This attractive and lavishly illustrated volume is divided into two parts. The first section traces Crowninshield's biography from his birth into one of Boston's wealthiest established commercial families in 1845 through to his death in Italy in 1918. It is impossible to separate his life story from his art. His patrimony afforded him the opportunity to pursue his career independent of financial concerns, and it provided him many commissions through his impressive social connections. His greatest influence on other artists came through his seven-year stint as an instructor at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, where he instituted an original curriculum that included summer sessions, a course on murals (the first such class in the United States), and readings in the literary classics because he believed artists had to have a solid cultural foundation. He further broadcast his vision of art through his one book, Mural Painting (1886), and in magazine articles.The second and larger section is a detailed critical examination of Crowninshield's art. The chapters are arranged by genre: stained glass, mural designs, and painting. Running three times longer than the next longest, the chapter on stained glass reflects what the authors considered to be their subject's most important artistic contribution. Julie Sloan is an expert on stained glass with several publications to her credit, and is clearly in her element discussing this topic. The authors argue that the most innovative and original work of the American renaissance was done in this field. Even though Crowninshield was overshadowed by contemporaries Louis Comfort Tiffany and John LaFarge, Crowninshield produced important works of his own-some of which can still be seen throughout New England. …","PeriodicalId":81429,"journal":{"name":"Historical journal of Massachusetts","volume":"44 1","pages":"184"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71134144","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"First Founders: American Puritans and Puritanism in an Atlantic World","authors":"Michael Rehm","doi":"10.5860/choice.50-2833","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.50-2833","url":null,"abstract":"First Founders: American Puritans and Puritanism in an Atlantic World. Francis J. Bremer. Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2012. 291 pages. $27.95 (hardcover).Francis Bremer's First Founders serves as a trenchant reminder of the religious and political diversity of New England Puritans. Bremer traces the lives of many prominent Puritans in early Massachusetts. In its totality, his collection of biographical sketches offers students and the public a themed portrait of Puritanism that confronts and complicates themes in Massachusetts historiography. Bremer's book is not intended for scholars of early America, but is a comprehensive study of Puritanism in seventeenth-century Massachusetts. New England Puritans were settlers, merchants, tradesmen, politicians, and clerics who espoused different opinions about the organization of government and religion in early Massachusetts. Although Puritans remained united in their fervency of faith, they were not guided by a rigid religious hierarchy. Instead, they embraced the autonomy of Congregationalism. Congregations were small communities centered on the Puritan meetinghouse and closely governed by full church members and their elected clerics. Bremer argues that this autonomy fostered ideological differences between Puritans and allowed a wide range of religious ideas to circulate throughout Massachusetts. As a result, Puritans never could achieve uniformity and were besieged by religious controversies. Indeed, only the Puritans' search for and preservation of the godly life united them.Relations among Puritan leaders represented larger religious conflicts in Massachusetts society. Bremer uses differences between contemporaries such as John Winthrop and Thomas Dudley to reveal unique disparities among New England Puritans. While Winthrop, the most affluent Puritan in seventeenth-century Massachusetts, tolerated slight differences in religious thought, Dudley was a strict Puritan who cherished orthodoxy. Both Winthrop and Dudley served as governor of Massachusetts and implemented laws that reflected their religious differences. Dudley proved a driving force behind the trial and subsequent excommunication of Roger Williams, a man who Winthrop held in high esteem. Bremer argues that Winthrop would have preferred to allow Williams to practice his faith with restraint. Winthrop later informed Williams of Dudley's intention to banish him to England, which allowed Williams to flee from Massachusetts. Bremer's analysis of the relationship between Winthrop and Dudley reveals the range of thought that existed in Puritan New England and exemplifies Puritans' constant struggle to define and enact a stable religious orthodoxy.Bremer confronts a more recent development in early New England scholarship: Puritan involvement in an Atlantic World. New England Puritans remained linked to their English counterparts through the exchange of goods, ideas, and people. Many prominent New England Puritans such as John","PeriodicalId":81429,"journal":{"name":"Historical journal of Massachusetts","volume":"43 1","pages":"144"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71140718","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"New Bedford's Civil War","authors":"J. Pittenger","doi":"10.5860/choice.50-2270","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.50-2270","url":null,"abstract":"New Bedford's Civil War. Earl F. Mulderink III. New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2012. 306 pages. $55.00 (hardcover).New Bedford, Massachusetts was considered to be the \"richest city in America\" in the decades before the Civil War by contemporary observers, as well as one of the most socially progressive. Merchants rich from the oil of the sperm whale walked the same streets as scores of freed slaves from the American South in what was surely one of the most diverse cities in America. Racial attitudes among residents of the town, though hardly ideal, were leaps and bounds beyond much of the rest of the country, and competition for economic opportunity was relatively just. However, the events of the Civil War would create significant repercussions for the city, and postbellum New Bedford would struggle to recapture the economic bounty that had graced the city in the years before the war ripped the country apart.Earl F. Mulderink, III has written an ambitious volume that carefully utilizes an impressive array of primary and secondary source material, backed by a wealth of quantitative data that renders the work a true social history. Mulderink's work is ambitious, as he seeks to analyze the economic, social, and political consequences that the Civil War field for New Bedford. His work is primarily focused on the repercussions that the war held for the social fabric of the city itself, and as such, those seeking an in-depth military history should look elsewhere. Mulderink does incorporate the history of the conflict indirectly throughout his work, namely through examination of recruitment efforts of white and black troops within the city, but his interest in the war is chiefly focused on the experiences of the city's African-American soldiers.The African-American experience in New Bedford is one of Mulderink's main areas of focus, and he ably backs his argument that while the city offered something of a haven to free blacks, economic opportunities for AfricanAmericans were hardly ideal, especially given competition with immigrants. However, Mulderink notes that New Bedford did have a larger percentage of black artisans than any other northern city, so chances for gainful, skilled employment did indeed exist for African-Americans. Furthermore, he vividly describes the abolitionist fervor that gripped much of Massachusetts in the decades leading up to the war, with free blacks in New Bedford playing a key role. African-Americans in the antebellum years were respected members of the larger population of the city who simultaneously built their own independent community comprised of powerful social ties.Once the war began and African-Americans were finally permitted to enlist in 1863, free black men of New Bedford proudly enlisted by the dozen in racially segregated units, including the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts regiment. Undoubtedly the most famous regiment of African-American troops from the war, especially after its immortalization by Hollywo","PeriodicalId":81429,"journal":{"name":"Historical journal of Massachusetts","volume":"43 1","pages":"151"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71139609","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"No Closure: Catholic Practice and Boston's Parish Shutdowns","authors":"L. Kennedy","doi":"10.5860/choice.49-2013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.49-2013","url":null,"abstract":"No Closure: Catholic Practice and Bostons Parish Shutdowns. John C. Seitz. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011. 248 pages + notes. $42.00 (hardcover).John C. Seitz has written a thoughtful study of Roman Catholic attitudes and practices as demonstrated in the recent crisis of Boston parish consolidations and church closings. A theologian at Fordham University, Seitz offers an illuminating account of those people in the Archdiocese of Boston who chose to resist the hierarchy's systematic closing of many parish communities early in the twenty-first century. He focuses on only a minority of Catholics and a few of the shuttered parish communities, particularly one in Boston and one in the suburbs, but he explores larger concerns through his extensive fieldwork and intense interaction with the \"resisters\". Although Seitz makes use of historical studies of Catholic Boston, this book is clearly a descriptive work based on his study of contemporary Boston Catholic culture. He acknowledges his debt to members of Harvard's Ethnography of Religion Workshop and frequently cites anthropological studies. Seitz also elucidates the dilemmas he encountered in being both an academic pursuing a systematic study and (in the pursuit of his work) being personally involved in the actions he describes.The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston in 2004 commenced a process to close down or \"suppress\" nearly one hundred parishes out of a total of 357 then extant. Coming so soon after the eruption of the spectacularly tragic revelations of clerical abuse within the archdiocese and the nation in 2002, there was little likelihood that the news of parish closings would be conflict-free. Most Catholics in the region either stopped attending or donating, or else accepted the closures and moved on to new parish communities. Seitz found himself attracted to a study of those who neither opted to leave the Catholic church nor accept the dictate to affiliate with another parish. He began his fieldwork in the second half of 2004 and truly immersed himself in the efforts made by Catholics, especially in the parishes of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in East Boston and St. Albert the Great in East Weymouth, to stop the closures.Seitz observed the resisters in action as they occupied church buildings and maintained vigils to enforce their vision. The people he met were attached to these parish communities and church buildings and refused to move on or allow either physical or emotional closure. While he emphasizes that the study is not comprehensive nor about a majority of Roman Catholics, Seitz argues successfully that it is crucial to understand what these occupiers were about. His concerns are theological as he tries to answer questions about a moment in Boston Catholic history. His concern is twofold: he wants to find out why some people resisted the closures and what the resistance tells us about modern Catholicism (pp. …","PeriodicalId":81429,"journal":{"name":"Historical journal of Massachusetts","volume":"43 1","pages":"154"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71135152","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Imagining New England: Explorations of Regional Identity from the Pilgrims to the Mid-Twentieth Century","authors":"David B. Raymond","doi":"10.5860/choice.39-5371","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.39-5371","url":null,"abstract":"Imagining New England: Explorations of Regional Identity from the Pilgrims to the Mid-Twentieth Century. By Joseph A. Conforti. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001. 400 pages. $49.95 (hardcover).Using a wide variety of cultural artifactspromotional literature, Puritan spiritual histories, works of geography, fiction, visual artifacts, and magazines-Joseph A. Conforti traces New England's evolution from the first generation of Puritans down through the first half of the twentieth century. Imagining New England is a cultural history that contends \"both on the ground and in the country of the imagination New England has been an ever-changing region\" (315). The crux of his argument, however, relies on the works of a few carefully selected and elaborately explained cultural interpreters whose works illustrate the shifting conceptions of the region.Central to New England regional identity were the Puritans and their sense of mission to the New World. The first generation of New Englanders did not conceive of themselves as \"New Englanders;\" rather, they viewed their settlement as a middling sort of \"second England,\" religiously reformed and modified to conform more closely to the idealized days of the English past. Succeeding generations mythologized the first as a \"Great Migration\" of heroic, inspirational figures whose errand into the wilderness brought forth a new English \"Israel\" worthy of honor and emulation. This sense of regional pride and exceptionalism was wedded to a re-Anglicized identification with the glory of the British Empire transformed by the political legacy of the Glorious Revolution and the material prosperity of the consumer revolution. The New England region, in their eyes, was a place apart from England and the rest of the colonies, but not too far apart.With the political and social upheaval of the American Revolution and independence, New Englanders' sense of place began to drift from its religious moorings. Concern with the difficulties of fashioning a republic of virtue led them to fashion a \"republicanized\" version of the Puritan past, one that set New Englanders up as a political city on a hill for the new nation to follow. Led by the Rev. Jebidiah Morse's highly political work in cultural geography and echoed by Timothy Dwight's musings in his Travels, New Englanders came to see themselves as a model of the kind of republican virtue needed to sustain the new nation. The New England heritage of community life centered on town meetings, churches, schools, and militias provided a model that could serve as an example for the other regions to follow.In the mid-to-late 1800s, New England's self-image shifted again, this time as a result of three key cultural inventions. First, there was the invention of the ideal orderly community-the white village with its churches, picket fences, and ample commons. Inhabiting these communities were the Yankees, men and women known for their republican virt","PeriodicalId":81429,"journal":{"name":"Historical journal of Massachusetts","volume":"42 1","pages":"168"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71090046","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Evangelicals at a Crossroads: Revivalism and Social Reform in Boston, 1860-1910","authors":"J. Barnhill","doi":"10.5860/choice.48-6841","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.48-6841","url":null,"abstract":"Evangelicals at a Crossroads: Revivalism and Social Reform in Boston, 1860-1910. By Benjamin L. Hartley. Lebanon, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2011. 296 pp. $85.00 (cloth), $39.95 (paper), $37.99 (e-book).New England is stereotyped as Congregationalist, since New England and Boston are, after all, the site of the Puritan founders and their religious legacy. Concurrently, Boston is also recognized as Catholic, owing to the massive influx in the early nineteenth century of Irish to Boston and surrounding areas.While stereotypes exist because they contain at least a kernel of truth, generally life and the world are more complex, more nuanced, and perhaps of a different nature altogether. In the case of New England in the second half of the nineteenth century, in the decades after the Civil War and before World War I, the stereotypes remained somewhat valid while strongly different religious groups of major significance emerged and became a significant, if not overwhelming, force in the evolution of Boston. Benjamin Hartley's well developed study of evangelicals during the period illustrates their impact on a city undergoing major political and structural change, in a religious environment that was changing dynamically as well.Evangelicals, regardless of denomination, believe in the need to be born again, to have an emotional experience of conversion rather than just an intellectual acceptance of the faith. They feel obligated to proselytize, to spread the faith to others, both the unchurched and those of competing faiths. They are not fundamentalists necessarily, although fundamentalists tend to be evangelical. Evangelicals belong to no particular denomination, and denominations routinely encompass both evangelical and nonevangelical believers. In Boston, evangelicals were strong in the Salvationist and Baptist denominations, but the largest evangelical contingents, and the most addressed in Hartley's work, were Methodists, leaders of the nondenominational open church, or social reformers of various types. Revivals were popular in the period. In fact, the author frames his work beginning with a massive revival by Dwight Moody in 1877 and ending with a more subdued revival by a lesser-known revivalist thirty years later.Methodists are representative of the flux of the era because they most clearly had to decide whether to maintain their somewhat primitive emotionalism in the face of newly emerging social stances. Methodism in the late nineteenth century was redefined from historical emotionalism and individualism to the more structured and formal approximation of a socially involved high church that, later, defined Methodism in the twentieth century.Not just in Boston but across the nation, religious turbulence affected both the old denominations and the new, evangelicals and non-evangelicals alike. There was the rise of the premillennial movement, whose tenet was that the world was not going to get any better until after the second coming.","PeriodicalId":81429,"journal":{"name":"Historical journal of Massachusetts","volume":"41 1","pages":"147"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71134324","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Lives of Margaret Fuller: A Biography","authors":"J. Mifflin","doi":"10.5860/choice.49-5529","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.49-5529","url":null,"abstract":"The Lives of Margaret Fuller: A Biography. By John Matteson. New York: W. Norton, 2012. 510 pages. Illustrations. $32.95 (hardcover).This thoroughly researched and well-written new biography of Margaret Fuller (18101850) takes a thematic rather than a strictly chronological approach, describing and assessing, chapter by chapter, the roles, concerns, and stances that characterized the multifaceted life of a fascinatingly complex woman. Fuller was, in her day, the best-read woman in the U.S. and perhaps the most outspoken and influential. The book ambitiously invites readers \"to observe Fuller's time on earth...as a succession of lives, each one building on those previously lived, each one preserving the markings and conditionings of its predecessors, and each one lived in anticipation of further incarnations' ' (xv).One of the keys to Fuller's life (or \"lives,\" as Matteson puts it) was the rigorous upbringing to which she was subjected from an early age, serving as an experimental subject in her father's attempt to overturn sexual stereotypes about child rearing. Margaret's early home-schooling in Cambridge, Massachusetts, consisted of a rigorous classical education in Greek, Latin, French, English literature, philosophy, mathematics, and natural science. Her daily diet of reading (and exacting oral examinations) would have exhausted a precocious adult. The result of this upbringing was a child prodigy destined eventually to hold her own with the leading male intellectuals of her era, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, but the toll on her personal life was devastating. Her life-long pursuit of ever-higher levels of intellectual excellence wore down her physical health. The demands she placed on other people made it difficult for her to find love or to be comfortably accepted in society. She was exceptional, and often alone.Fuller's scholarly relationship with Emerson and others led to her editorship of The Dial, a periodical (1840-1844) associated with the Transcendentalist movement in Concord, Massachusetts. Around the same time, she hosted a series of \"conversations\" for women, who paid for the privilege of attending. These seminars were intended to expose women to a variety of subjects, encouraging them to think on their own and to express well-reasoned opinions. She also taught classes at Bronson Alcott's Temple School in Boston. Eventually tiring of what she perceived to be Bostonian provincialism, Fuller moved to New York to write for Horace Greeley's NewYork Tribune as the paper's first female employee. She authored the first feminist book in America, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), based on articles first published in The Dial. The book demanded legal equality for women, became a best seller, and made Fuller famous (as well as notorious, because her research included interviews with prostitutes as well as women leading more conventional lives). In 1846, Greeley offered her the opportunity t","PeriodicalId":81429,"journal":{"name":"Historical journal of Massachusetts","volume":"41 1","pages":"141"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71137101","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"We Will Be Satisfied with Nothing Less\": The African American Struggle for Equal Rights in the North during Reconstruction","authors":"Kam Teo","doi":"10.5860/choice.49-5870","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.49-5870","url":null,"abstract":"\"We Will Be Satisfied With Nothing Less\": The African American Struggle for Equal Rights in the North during Reconstruction. By Hugh Davis. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011. 232 pages. $45 (cloth).The conventional Reconstruction historiography focuses on the struggles of African Americans to realize equal rights in the South in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. However, Hugh Davis-a Professor Emeritus of history at Southern Connecticut State University-sheds considerable light on the lesser known African American battle for male suffrage rights in northern and western states. In We Will Be Satisfied With Nothing Less, Davis provocatively claims that \"Reconstruction began in the North\" where the relatively small number of northern African Americans placed political pressure on reluctant white Republicans to live up to the ideals and rhetoric espoused by the party of Lincoln. Davis's work tracks the initial success of northern and western African Americans from the late-1860s to the mid1870s in their drive for political equality, accessibility to public schools and the beginning of their downward political and social trajectory from the mid-1870s onwards as the reactionary politics of Reconstruction began the reversal of many gains.We Will Be Satisfied With Nothing Less is organized thematically around two issues: black male suffrage and equal access to public schools within the context of political machinations of various African American groups as they navigated awkward partnerships with white Republicans, many of whom were reactionary and racist. The first chapter chronicles the struggle of northern African Americans before and during the Civil War with the introduction of organizations such as the National Equal Rights League and the Pennsylvania Equal rights League, both created in the 1850s. Davis also provides evidence that \"race pride and consciousness\" predated the Civil War, in part, by showing the nascent political activism of individuals such as Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany (7). Indeed, there was a vibrant and dynamic African American community that either proselytized emigration (a return to Africa) or those that had faith in the founding democratic principles of the United States. African American political organizations at the national level or in the form of state auxiliaries were primarily run by middle class African American men, though the author posits that the leadership did reach out \"to the black Masses (28).\" Interestingly, Davis asserts that African American women were more likely than African American men to legally challenge segregation and discrimination in public areas due to their greater interaction with whites in the workplace.In the aftermath of the Civil War the political focus on manhood suffrage shifted from the state level - because the political ethos was such that states had \"sole authority\" to determine political rights - to lobbying Washington (47). According to Davis, establishment","PeriodicalId":81429,"journal":{"name":"Historical journal of Massachusetts","volume":"70 1","pages":"143"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71137819","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Multicultural Social Studies: Using Local History in the Classroom","authors":"M. A. Henry","doi":"10.5860/choice.43-6667","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.43-6667","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":81429,"journal":{"name":"Historical journal of Massachusetts","volume":"40 1","pages":"254"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71112838","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}