Boston: A Visual History - Couverture rigide

BEAGLE, JONATHAN M. PH.D.

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 1623540003 ISBN 13 : 9781623540005

Editeur : Imagine Publishing, Inc, 2013

A propos du livre

Extrait :

            I was born in Boston nearly eighty years ago, and with time out for college in Pennsylvania and military service in Korea, I have been a Bostonian and a citizen of Massachusetts my entire life. True, I tried mightily to become eligible for public housing in Washington, D.C. by running unsuccessfully for the presidency, but Boston gave birth to me, shaped my ideas and philosophy, was responsible for my love of history and has given me the rare opportunity to serve in public life for over thirty years. During the past twenty of these years, I’ve had the chance to teach what I love—public policy and public service—to hundreds of students at Boston’s Northeastern University.
In point of fact, I grew up in the town of Brookline, and it was there that I was first educated and ran and won my first political campaigns. Those of us who grew up in the nearby suburbs never considered ourselves anything but Bostonians. When my buddies in my unit in Korea wanted to know where I came from, I told them proudly that I came from Boston and from the Commonwealth— not the state—of Massachusetts.
The Boston where I was born and nurtured, however, was very different from the Boston of today. It was a tough city, heavily ethnic and often angry and intolerant. It was racist. It was anti- Semitic. Many of its neighborhoods from the 1930s through the 1950s were poor, in decline, and being abandoned by residents who began moving out to the near and far suburbs. Some of these neighborhoods became the destination for African-Americans from America’s South and Latinos from Latin America. Immigrants in Boston faced the same kind of discrimination that they faced in virtually every area of the country.
            In fact, people of color simply couldn’t live in my town, and they couldn’t live in many other Boston neighborhoods either. The famous school desegregation battle that tore the city apart in the mid-1970s revealed an ugly side of the city that many Bostonians had refused to acknowledge for years.
            Today’s Boston, fortunately, is a very different place. For one thing, we stopped tearing it down to try to turn it into something that it wasn’t. When post World War II solutions to the problems of traffic and congestion threatened to destroy the Boston that this book so beautifully describes, we caught ourselves in the nick of time and killed the so-called Master Highway Plan that would have turned Boston’s transportation system into a Los Angeles cousin. We took the billions in federal highway funds that we had refused to use and invested them in what is arguably the best public transportation system in the country. The city began preserving and restoring our historic treasures that we had been systematically destroying and created a new, lovingly preserved and historic Boston that is today one of the nation’s—and the world’s—greatest and most beautiful cities.
            And we have done it while bringing people together, celebrating our racial and ethnic diversity, restoring so much of what makes Boston so very special, and by taking full advantage of one of our greatest assets—the Commonwealth’s 120 colleges and universities, many of them located in Boston or Cambridge. We built one of the most modern and innovative economies in the world, while making sure our political and cultural history remains very much a part of Boston’s present and future.
            Speaking of our political history, it is one of our greatest strengths, as most students of American history know. It is not an accident that Massachusetts regularly produces some of the nation’s best political operatives and flocks of candidates for the presidency. We haven’t won all those presidential campaigns (not by a long shot). Candidates named Dukakis, Tsongas, Ted Kennedy, Kerry, and Romney have all gone down to defeat, but there is no other state in the nation that has fielded as many candidates in recent history for the nation’s highest office, or claimed not one but three Speakers of the U.S. House of Representatives during my lifetime, or sent the first African-American to the United States Senate since Reconstruction. In fact, some have argued that every child born in Boston is immediately infected with two diseases— politics and the Red Sox—and this is pretty close to the truth.
            Ah, the Red Sox. Our fierce dedication to the city’s professional sports teams is another unique feature. Our baseball team claims a particularly special place in all of us. When the powers that be tried to tear down Fenway Park and replace it with a phony version of the real thing at a cost of $850 million, a small but dedicated band of opponents named “Save Fenway” launched the battle that ultimately stopped Fenway’s destruction, restored the historic 1912 ball field into what is now an absolute jewel, and set the stage for what has been nearly 700 consecutive sold-out crowds in that wonderful stadium.
            And it wasn’t an accident that I and one of my cross-country running buddies at Brookline High School ran and finished the Boston Marathon in 1951when we were high school seniors. That historic race—another Boston tradition—draws more than a million spectators along the route every Patriot’s Day in April and comes right through our town as the runners head for the finish line. We grew up out there, watching that race from the age of three.
            Those of us who participated in some way in Boston’s renaissance are extraordinarily proud of what has happened to the Boston of our youth. It is truly a beautiful city today in so many ways—physically, culturally, as a meeting ground for an extraordinarily diverse community—and it just gets better and better. But we built on the foundation of those who came before us, and nobody who grows up in or moves to Boston can possibly be unaware of the rich history that surrounds us and has shaped our capital city.
            That is why this book is so special and such a valuable contribution to our understanding of the forces that shaped present-day Boston and Massachusetts. It is beautifully written and exquisitely illustrated. It tells it like it is (and was) and minces no words about the city’s triumphs and defeats. It is a must read for those of us who have lived all our lives here and for those who are merely visitors or recent arrivals. For it is this combination of all of us that has made it the stunningly attractive and vibrant city that it is today.
- Michael S. Dukakis, Former Governor of Massachusetts

Présentation de l'éditeur :

Boston: the city on the hill, filled with incomparable historic sites, bustling neighborhoods, and cultural riches. One of the oldest communities in America, it also is one of the most forward-looking and youthful. Take a stunning pictorial tour of this Colonial gem that helped give birth to the United States, led by a professor who knows every lively detail of its highways and byways, its landmarks and hidden treasures, its stories and lore. Through remarkably beautiful images, Jonathan Beagle ushers readers through the Back Bay, with its public gardens, renowned Old South Church, and John Hancock Tower, to Bunker Hill House and the USS Constitution in the North End, to the surrounding Hub with its many museums, memorials, and universities (including MIT and Harvard). Visit Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market in the Financial District; the Long Wharf Marina and the Aquarium by the Waterfront; and the State House and African Meeting Hall on elegant Beacon Hill. And of course, what trip to Boston would be complete without a stopover at Fenway Park, home of the Red Sox?

Beagle’s engaging and knowledgeable commentary, along with the wealth of photographs, provide the perfect introduction to Boston for any native, visitor, or armchair traveler.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Imagine Publishing, Inc
• Date d'édition: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1623540003
• ISBN 13: 9781623540005
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 176