Northeastern University Press

AFTER THE SIEGE
A Social History of Boston, 1775-1800

Jacqueline Barbara Carr

Description:
During the late 1770s, Boston's townspeople were struggling to rebuild a community devastated by British occupation, the ensuing siege by the Continental Army, and the Revolutionary war years. After the British attacked Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, Boston's population plummeted from 15,000 civilians to less than 3,000, property was destroyed and plundered, and the economy was on the verge of collapse. How the once thriving colonial seaport and its demoralized inhabitants recovered in the wake of such demographic, physical, and economic ruin is the subject of this compelling and well-researched work.

Drawing on extensive primary sources, including ward tax assessors' Taking Books, church records, census records, birth and marriage records, newspaper accounts, and town directories, Jacqueline Barbara Carr brings to life Boston's remarkable rebirth as a flourishing cosmopolitan city at the dawn of the nineteenth century. She examines this watershed period in the city's social and cultural history from the perspective of the town's ordinary men and women, both white and African American, re-creating the determined community of laborers, artisans, tradesmen, mechanics, and seamen who demonstrated an incredible perseverance in reshaping their shattered town and lives.

Filled with fascinating and dramatic stories of hardship, conflict, continuity, and change, the engaging narrative describes how Boston rebounded in less than twenty-five years through the efforts of inhabitants who survived the ordeal of the siege, those who fled British occupation and returned after the war, and the influx of citizens from many different places seeking new opportunities in the growing city. Carr explores the complex forces that drove Boston's transformation, taking into consideration such topics as the built environment and the town's neighborhoods, the impact of town government on peoples' lives, the day-to-day trials of restoring and managing the community, the effect of the post-war economy on work and daily life, and forms of leisure and theater entertainment.

After the Siege vividly recaptures a crucial yet often neglected chapter in the social history of Boston and the early republic.

JACQUELINE BARBARA CARR is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Vermont.
18 illustrations/maps/notes/bibliography/index
2004 ISBN 1555536298 * $40.00 cloth 288 pages
SALEM: Place, Myth, and Memory

Edited by Dane Anthony Morrison; Nancy Lusignan Schultz

Description:
How is a sense of place created, imagined, and reinterpreted over time? That is the intriguing question addressed in this comprehensive look at the 400-year, multi-layered history of Salem, Massachusetts, and the experiences of fourteen generations of people who lived in a place forever enshrined, indeed mythologized, in the public imagination by the horrific witch trials and executions of 1692 and 1693.

By exploring the rich textures of Salem as a local, national, and global entity from its settling in 1626 to the present, this highly original, cohesive, and teachable collection illuminates how people influence a place and how a place influences its people. The contributors combine the perspectives of history, literary studies, the arts, and popular culture with compelling photographs to examine Salem's many-sided urban identities over four centuries: frontier outpost of European civilization, cosmopolitan seaport, gateway to the Far East, mecca of exceptional architecture, refuge for religious diversity, center for education, and 'Witch City' tourist attraction.

This passage through Salem's long history—its people, legacies, and myths—challenges readers to reconsider the multiple meanings of any place. For courses in American studies, this unique work will deepen one's understanding of how a place's present resonates with its past; and, for the general reader, it will enrich the experience of visitors touring Salem's historic sites and vibrant cultural institutions.

DANE ANTHONY MORRISON is a professor and former chair of the History Department at Salem State College. He is the author of A Praying People: Massachusett Acculturation and the Failure of the Puritan Mission, 1600–1690.

NANCY LUSIGNAN SCHULTZ is Professor and Coordinator of Graduate Studies in English and American Studies at Salem State College. She is the author of Fire and Roses: The Burning of the Charlestown Convent, 1834, also published by Northeastern University Press

CONTENTS
Salem Enshrined (Nancy Lusignan Schultz and Dane Anthony Morrison)
Salem as Frontier Outpost (Emerson Baker II, Salem State College)
Salem as Religious Proving Ground (Christopher White, Harvard University)
Salem as Enterprise Zone (Robert Booth)
Salem as Athenaeum (Matthew McKenzie, Sea Education Association)
Salem as Citizen of the World (Dane Anthony Morrison)
Salem as the Nation's Schoolhouse (Rebecca Noel, Harvard University)
Salem as Hawthorne's Creation (Nancy Lusignan Schultz)
Salem as Architectural Mecca (John Goff)
Salem as Global Market (Aviva Chomsky, Salem State College)
Salem as Crime Scene (Margaret Press)
Salem Witches as Commodities (Frances Hill)
Salem's House of Seven Gables as Historic Site (Lorinda Goodwin, Boston University)
Coda: Montage of Brick and Water (J. D. Scrimgeour, Salem State College)

312 pages
Edited by Dane Anthony Morrison; Nancy Lusignan Schultz
40 illustrations/notes/index
2004 ISBN 1555536093 * $28.95 cloth
Published: 2004

BOSTON'S HISTORIES
Essays in Honor of Thomas H. O'Connor

Edited by James O'Toole; David Quigley

Description:
In a distinguished teaching and writing career that spans half a century, Thomas H. O'Connor has explored in-depth the richly layered history of his native Boston, bringing the city's diverse and fascinating heritage to a wide audience of historians and general readers alike. Now his significant contributions are celebrated in these essays by leading scholars in the field.
The broad range of histories included here build on and extend O'Connor's work, offering a new lens through which to view Boston's vibrant social, ethnic, political, and religious past.

JAMES O'TOOLE is Associate Professor of History at Boston College. He is the author of Passing for White: Race, Religion, and the Healy Family, 1820–1920 and Militant and Triumphant: William Henry O'Connell and the Catholic Church in Boston, 1859–1944. DAVID QUIGLEY is Assistant Professor of History at Boston College. He is the author of Second Founding: New York City and the Reconstruction of American Democracy and coeditor (with David N. Gellman) of Jim Crow New York: A Documentary History of Race and Citizenship, 1777–1877. THOMAS H. O'CONNOR is University Historian and Professor of History, Emeritus, at Boston College. His numerous books include Boston Catholics: A History of the Church and Its People; Civil War Boston: Home Front and Battlefield; The Boston Irish: A Political History; and The Hub: Boston Past and Present, all published by Northeastern University Press.

CONTENTS
O'Connor's Boston (Sam Bass Warner, Jr., Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
'A long train of hideous consequences': Boston, Capital Punishment, and the Transformation of Republicanism, 1780–1805 (Alan Rogers, Boston College)
Power and Social Responsibility: Entrepreneurs and the Black Community in Antebellum Boston (Lois E. Horton, George Mason University, and James Oliver Horton, George Washington University)
The Secret World of Radical Publishers: Thayer and Eldridge of Boston (Albert Von Frank, Washington State University)
'Lawless and Unprincipled': Women in Boston's Civil War Draft Riot (Judith Ann Giesberg, Villanova University)
Portrait of a Parish: Class, Ethnicity, and Race at Boston's Cathedral of the Holy Cross, 1865–1880 (James O'Toole, Boston College)
Charles Sumner and the Political Cultures of Reconstruction in Boston (David Quigley, Boston College)
The Irish Home Rule Issue and Boston Politics (Lawrence Kennedy, University of Scranton)
Contested Bodies and Souls: Immigrant Converts in Boston, 1890–1940 (Kristen Petersen, Brown University)
'A strong argument for juries': The Saga of Willett v. Herrick (Mark I. Gelfand, Boston College)
The Politics of Sex and Race in Boston's NAACP, 1920–1940 (Sarah Deutsch, University of Arizona)
Boston, The Last Hurrah, and the Pluralist Vision of American Politics (James Connolly, Ball State University)
The Failure of Catholic Interracialism in Boston before Busing (William Leonard, Emmanuel College)
The Catholic Church and the Desegregation of Boston's Public Schools (James E. Glinski, Xaverian Brothers High School)

256 pages
notes/bibliography/index
2003 ISBN 1555535828 * $45.00 cloth
Published: 2003

Now in Paper

PURITAN FAMILY LIFE
The Diary of Samuel Sewall

Judith S. Graham

Description:
Historians have commonly characterized Puritan family life as joyless, repressive, even brutal. By such accounts, Puritan parents disciplined their children mercilessly, crushed their wills, responded callously to their deaths, and routinely sent them out of the home to be raised by cold-hearted surrogates. The diary of prominent Boston jurist and merchant Samuel Sewall (1652–1730) contradicts this grim portrait of the Puritan household, depicting instead a nurturing and caring place for childrearing.

Although Sewall was an exceptional Puritan father and not a representative one, his judicial, civic, religious, and business activities projected him far beyond his own privileged and respectable circumstances. As a record of the family and social life of New England's third generation, his remarkable journal, which spans fifty-five years, is rivaled only by that of his friend Cotton Mather. Sewall provides rich details about the home where his and Hannah Sewall's fourteen children were born, and the six who survived infancy were raised. He takes the reader through the streets and byways of Boston, to the meetinghouse, to the places where his children were educated and apprenticed, and to the homes of friends, neighbors, and kin.
Judith S. Graham's close reading of Sewall's diary and family papers reveals that warmth, sympathy, and love often marked the Puritan parent-child relationship. She suggests that the special nature of childhood was a concept that parents understood well, and that there was a practical and clear purpose for the 'putting out' of children. Graham provides a much-needed balance to accepted scholarship on Puritan life and offers new insights into the history of both early New England and the family.

JUDITH S. GRAHAM is a graduate of Brandeis University and received her Ph.D. in History from Boston College. She lives in Newton, Massachusetts.

296 pages
illustrations/tables/notes/bibliography/index
2000 ISBN 1555534457 * $40.00 cloth
2003 ISBN 1555535933 * $22.50 paper
Published: 2003

January 11, 2005