Historical journal of Massachusetts最新文献

{"title":"When a Heart Turns Rock Solid: The Lives of Three Puerto Rican Brothers on and off the Streets","authors":"J. A. Marshall","doi":"10.5860/choice.47-6567","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.47-6567","url":null,"abstract":"When a Heart Turns Rock Solid: The Lives of Three Puerto Rican Brothers On And Off The Streets. By Timothy Black. New York: Pantheon Books, 2009. 464 pages. $29.95 (hardcover). Sociologist Timothy Black's ethnography of three brothers from Puerto Rico uses their experiences, largely drawn from Springfield, Massachusetts, to argue that government and corporate policies along with insidious racism are the cause of a growing underclass. A professor of sociology, Black acknowledges that by definition ethnography must be vulnerable to the risks of subjectivity. This is the critical problem throughout the work. Given the nearly twenty years he invests in not only chronicling the lives of these youth as they grow into adulthood, but in trying to advocate for them, subjectivity is unavoidable. Black immerses himself in the culture of their world, spending innumerable nights on Springfield's drug-infested streets. What results is not only a powerful work of social criticism but an engaging challenge to the deeply ingrained image of the Springfield Renaissance of the 1980s. Black is not a historian, yet his work deftly details social, economic, and workforce history. The reader is taken into a dark world of exploitation, bureaucratic apathy, and racism. The Rivera brothers and extended family are victims of United States colonial policies against Puerto Rico. They are casualties of the de-industrialization of the American economy and its transition from high-waged manufacturing jobs to those that are servicebased, featuring minimum wages for those without education. Adequate education is denied them by the racism of segregated, underperforming schools in cities experiencing white flight. Lacking white privilege or an accommodating educational system, facing draconian waves of social service cuts and a difficult recession, all three turn to the only industry available, the illegal drug economy. Violence, crime, gang involvement, incarceration and addiction overtake or at least touch each of them. Black points the blame at former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker. No longer the hero who saved the nation from the \"Great Inflation,\" Volcker stands accused of serving as a corporate puppet, defending their interests against successful social movements and saturated world markets by sacrificing jobs, unions and the nation's industrial base in the interest of recovering corporate profitability. Joining Volcker is Ronald Reagan, taking advantage of the racist reaction to the Civil Rights Movement and the Great Society to bring forth de-regulation, tax cuts, and the dismantling of the welfare state established through the New Deal and the programs of the liberal 1960s. These government policies, combined with expansion of the illegal drug industry and the war on drugs, with the resulting growth of the prison industrial complex, Black cites as the cause of the rampant poverty of inner city hubs such as Springfield and Worcester, Massachusetts, and Hartford, Conne","PeriodicalId":81429,"journal":{"name":"Historical journal of Massachusetts","volume":"38 1","pages":"184"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71130307","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":"Money, Morals, and Politics: Massachusetts in the Age of the Boston Associates","authors":"Thomas M Slopnick","doi":"10.5860/choice.39-6003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.39-6003","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":81429,"journal":{"name":"Historical journal of Massachusetts","volume":"38 1","pages":"161"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71090283","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":"Beyond Vietnam: The Politics of Protest in Massachusetts, 1974-1990","authors":"R. Weir","doi":"10.5860/choice.47-4630","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.47-4630","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":81429,"journal":{"name":"Historical journal of Massachusetts","volume":"38 1","pages":"150"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71129441","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":"Massachusetts Quilts: Our Common Wealth","authors":"Dixie Webb","doi":"10.5860/choice.47-0079","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.47-0079","url":null,"abstract":"Massachusetts Quilts: Our Common Wealth. Edited by Lynne Zacek Bassett. Hanover: University Press of New England, 2009. 336 pages $60.00 (hardcover). LynneBassett, with ten other contributors, offers a fascinating study of Massachusetts quilts in the context of history, genealogy, local industry, and textile production in the handsomely presented Massachusetts Quilts: Our Common Wealth. Including only a small percentage of the nearly 6,000 Massachusetts quilts they (and the many members of the Massachusetts Quilt Documentation Project) have studied since 1994, a wide range of techniques, fabrics and designs are represented in a thorough and carefully documented historical context. The research findings are divided into three major thematic sections: History, Community, and Memory. Approached much like an exhibition catalogue, introductory essays provide an overview of each of the three divisions and are followed by illustrated examples discussed in detail. Geographical distinctions create the divisions under History and include some of the first extant quilted objects known in Massachusetts: pieced cloth-covered hand screens and petticoats, as well as whole cloth quilts and a quilted palampore dating 1825 to 1850. Quilting gatherings, agricultural fairs, and immigrant and ethnic communities are a few of the themes that organize the section under Community; and Friendship and Signature Quilts provide two of the themes designated Memory. Bassett and her major contributors (each a textile curator, quilt historian, or independent historian) emphasize the historical context for each quilted object (documenting genealogy, researching family stories, referencing dying and textile history, citing relevant economic and industrial circumstances) with their visual description of the textiles, the patchwork or applique pattern and the quilting design of the works. The attentive descriptions of the quilts encourage careful looking on the part of the reader and the contextual history keep these works firmly planted in the history of Massachusetts. The volume's \"coffee table book\" format provides room for photographs of the entire quilted object that beautifully illustrate the textural surface of many of the works. Portrait photographs, contemporary images of relevant historic sites, details of some quilts, and line drawings articulating the quilted designs also provide welcome information. However, any non-scholarly connotations associated with the term 'coffee table book' do not apply to Massachusetts Quilts. Family oral histories are challenged and documented as factual or dispelled, references to current quilt history research appears throughout, provenance is carefully documented, collateral objects (e.g. merchants' sample swatch books and family memorabilia) shed greater light on the context of the quilt's creation, and diary entries documenting contemporary quilting activities reveal how quilts and quilting fit into the daily life of eighteenth and ninet","PeriodicalId":81429,"journal":{"name":"Historical journal of Massachusetts","volume":"38 1","pages":"152"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71126037","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":"Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism","authors":"C. Cameron","doi":"10.5860/choice.44-4657","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.44-4657","url":null,"abstract":"Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering the History oj American Abolitionism. By Timothy Patrick McCarthy and John Stauffer. New York and London: The New Press, 2006. 382 pages. $22.95 (paperback). In the historiography of American abolitionism there are a number of important debates among scholars, perhaps none more important than the \"origins\" debate. One origin that is just beginning to receive its due is the rise of black protest during the revolutionary period. By stretching the temporal boundaries of abolitionist historiography and fully including the efforts of both women and African American abolitionists, the essays in Prophets of Protest reposition the movement as an interracial one in which blacks themselves first articulated the most prominent arguments that would comprise the radical abolition movement from the 1830s until the Civil War. Beginning with a reassessment of abolitionist historiography, Manisha Sinha contends that \"despite some prominent exceptions, the dominant picture of abolitionists in American history is that of bourgeois reformers burdened by racial paternalism and economic conservatism\" (23). To counter this dominant picture of American abolitionists, Sinha argues that we must look to the efforts of both women and African Americans in bringing down slavery. Indeed, blacks were themselves the progenitors of black abolitionist historiography. William C. Nell's work anticipated modern scholarship on black abolition by documenting black activists and showing continuity in the efforts of African Americans from the revolutionary to antebellum periods. The work of William Wells Brown and Martin Delany similarly present an expansive sense of black abolitionism by highlighting the influence of the Haitian Revolution and the interracial nature of the movement. These early activists and scholars shaped both the course and interpretations of the movement for years to come. While white academics ignored their work, African American scholars from Carter Woodson to Dorothy Porter Wesley and Benjamin Quarles highlighted many of the same themes as these earlier historians of abolition, and modern scholars such as Gary Nash and Leslie Harris have continued to paint a broader picture of abolitionism than the traditional story would suggest exists. Along with this historiographie assessment of black abolitionism, many of the essays in this collection present compelling arguments for the importance of black protest in the origins of the American antislavery movement. Richard Newman argues for the prominence of \"black founders\" in the movement, or \"men and women who fought against racial oppression in some way, shape, or form, and thereby established models of protest for later activists\" (62). These founders included individuals such as Prince Hall, Paul Cuffe and Phillis Wheatley of Massachusetts, Richard Allen and Absalom Jones of Philadelphia, and William Hamilton of New York City. Black founders helped to develop independent black insti","PeriodicalId":81429,"journal":{"name":"Historical journal of Massachusetts","volume":"38 1","pages":"164"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71115131","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":"From the Puritans to the Projects: Public Housing and Public Neighbors","authors":"Seth Kershner","doi":"10.5860/choice.38-6508","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.38-6508","url":null,"abstract":"From the Puritans to the Projects: Public Housing and Public Neighbors. By Lawrence J. Vale. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. 482 pages. $22.50 (paperback). The question of class inequality has always been hotly contested terrain, occupied on one side by those who demand corrective government intervention and, on the other, by those who maintain that the intervention itself is the problem. Far beyond the realm of academic questions of justice and fairness, however, lie the harsh reminders that inequality endures, despite the well-intentioned efforts of our best citizens and elected representatives. Perhaps the most visible and striking reminders are the high-rise housing projects of American cities. In From the Puritans to the Projects, Lawrence Vale attempts to explain how \"the projects became the most vilified domestic environment in the United States and why their residents came to carry such a broadly shared stigma\" (v). In so doing, Vale, a Professor of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, brings an architectural sensibility to bear on his more than twenty years of research into the historical roots of public housing. The result is an illuminating study that exposes some of the enduring antinomies of American social welfare policy. For example, while public housing has often been at the center of contentious debate in American politics, officials and citizens alike have also agreed that they have a duty to care for their public neighbors (Vale's term for those who cannot meet their community's socioeconomic standards). It is Vale's signal accomplishment as a historian to explore the historical roots of this ambivalence, arguing that the troubled housing projects of today can be better understood if they are seen as having grown out of the cultural context of Puritan America. Although nominally national in scope, the emphasis throughout this book is on the city of Boston, whose \"long history affords a rare opportunity to explore the complete development of public housing in one place\" (9). One recurring theme in this narrative is the need to distinguish between deserving and undeserving segments of the poor. This is evident when, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was up to Massachusetts town selectmen to distribute aid to \"paupers.\" If applicants were judged to be poor through no fault of their own, they received aid or \"outdoor relief while staying at home. If instead they were seen as \"mad,\" immoral, or simply lazy, they would receive \"indoor relief,\" which meant being forced to take up residence in an almshouse. …","PeriodicalId":81429,"journal":{"name":"Historical journal of Massachusetts","volume":"37 1","pages":"159"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71087374","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":"Changing Rapture: Emily Dickinson's Poetic Development","authors":"G. Guercio","doi":"10.5860/choice.45-4217","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.45-4217","url":null,"abstract":"Changing Rapture: Emily Dickinson's Poetic Development. By Aliki Bamstone. Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 2006. 208 pages. $45.00 (hardcover). Critics have traditionally viewed Emily Dickinson as a poet whose work remained stagnant but was read because of its intrigue and possible hidden meaning. Aliki Barnstone's published doctoral dissertation Changing Rapture: Emily Dickinson 's Poetic Development argues that Dickinson's work developed in a very complex three-phase progress. Dickinson's poetic development, or rapture, as Barnstone terms it, is marked by a struggle against Calvinism and her involvement with Transcendentalism. Barnstone, a Professor of English at the University of Missouri, describes Dickinson's three-step development as follows: the use of satire to critique Calvinism and Sentimentalism; a 'self-conversion' or intellectual crisis where she mastered Calvinist theology; and a struggle with Calvinism and selfinhalation to a re-evaluation of Ralph Waldo Emerson's selfhood and self-reliance. Barnstone's study carries a Massachusetts tenor, given that it questions the very basis of American culture from its Puritan origins to the late nineteenth century by challenging and reworking philosophies of American culture that originated in Massachusetts. Barnstone describes the first phase of Emily Dickinson's development as a satirical criticism against Calvinism and Sentimentalism. Dickinson's stance was largely grounded in the dual premise that either rejected women or depicted women as passive. Through Calvinism Dickinson believed that women functioned \"within the discourse of man, a signifier that has always referred back to its opposite signifier which annihilates its specific energy and diminishes or stifles its very different sound\" (39). If women were to create their own voice they would have to \"turn it around, and seize it; ... make it theirs . . . bite that tongue with her very own teeth to invent for herself a language to get outside of' (39). Dickinson, in turn, suggested that women create their own language and form of expression, one based on a poetic technique whose meaning lies primarily hidden in narrative gaps. Sentimentalism - because of its overtness - depicted women as passive, in Dickinson's estimation. The second phase of Dickinson's development was marked by an intellectual crisis wherein she mastered Calvinist theology. Throughout her second phase Dickinson maintained a radical shift from traditional orthodox views to heterodox ones. …","PeriodicalId":81429,"journal":{"name":"Historical journal of Massachusetts","volume":"37 1","pages":"151"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71119556","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":"Beyond the Farm: National Ambitions in Rural New England","authors":"J. Barnhill","doi":"10.5860/choice.46-3458","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.46-3458","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":81429,"journal":{"name":"Historical journal of Massachusetts","volume":"37 1","pages":"153"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71123250","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":"Woman's Voice, Woman's Place: Lucy Stone and the Birth of the Woman's Rights Movement","authors":"Corinne H. Smith","doi":"10.5860/choice.41-3008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.41-3008","url":null,"abstract":"Woman's Voice, Woman's Place: Lucy Stone and the Birth of the Woman's Rights Movement. By Joelle Million. Westport: Praeger, 2003. 339 pages. $62.95 (hardcover). Antislavery, temperance, and the rights of women: the mid-nineteenth century offered a cornucopia of reform movements, and West Brookfield native Lucy Stone (1818-1893) was at the forefront of many of them. Author and independent scholar Joelle Million offers us here not only a biography of Stone, but also a chronology of the causes to which she dedicated herself. These causes are so intertwined that one part of the tale cannot be told without the others. Readers follow Lucy Stone's path from the family farm in central Massachusetts and an unfulfilling study at Mount Holyoke College to coeducational life at Oberlin College in Ohio. It was there that the young woman determined what her life's work would be: crusading for the full rights of the individual, regardless of gender or race. Stone returned and began campaigning for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in 1848, speaking to mixed authences when it was still a new and unusual occurrence for any female to do so. Though she was at times wracked with migraine headaches and twinges of self-doubt, Stone proved to be a talented and compelling lecturer. As her popularity grew, she found herself traveling throughout the Northeast and the Midwest to promote the major reform platforms of the day. She easily shared the stage with such noted personalities as William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Wendell Phillips, and Theodore Parker. When she spoke from her heart, even diehard opponents changed their minds. Gradually Stone's focus centered more specifically on the rights of women and me issues of suffrage, marriage, and even reform dress (\"Bloomers\"). The work examines the status of women in that era of American culture, as well as the burgeoning groundswell that would eventually lead to the National Woman's Rights Conventions of the 1 850s. Million details the struggles within the movement by including dozens of excerpts from letters sent to Stone from Antoinette L. Brown, Amelia Bloomer, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, among others. Although Stone had been adamant that she would remain forever single \"Tis next to a chattel slave to be a legal wife\" - that resolve was eventually thawed by Henry Blackwell, a man who shared her sophisticated views of the equal partnership of the ideal marriage. …","PeriodicalId":81429,"journal":{"name":"Historical journal of Massachusetts","volume":"37 1","pages":"149"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71099053","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":"Captive Histories: English, French, and Native Narratives of the 1704 Deerfield Raid","authors":"D. Smailes","doi":"10.5860/choice.44-4046","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.44-4046","url":null,"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. …","PeriodicalId":81429,"journal":{"name":"Historical journal of Massachusetts","volume":"37 1","pages":"147"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71115414","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}