Review: The Atlas of Boston History

Abstract

Where's Boston? was the title of an innovative multimedia installation produced for the Bicentennial of the American Revolution in 1976. Intended to celebrate the role of Boston and its people from its earliest history to the present, the installation raised key questions that students of the city have continued to explore. Their work has led to the emergence of a robust publishing industry devoted to histories, guidebooks, and atlases that have made their exploration both easier and more complex. For scholars of cartography, William Wilkie's Historical Atlas of Massachusetts (1991) marked a watershed in the study of cartographic representations of the commonwealth. Other valuable additions to the literature include Mapping Boston (2001), edited by Alex Krieger and David Cobb with an introduction by Norman B. Leventhal, whose important map collection became the foundation of the Leventhal Map Room at the Boston Public Library. Shortly after that volume's publication, Nancy S. Seasholes's Gaining Ground: A History of Landmaking in Boston (2003) further enhanced our understanding of this place over time.1 Now, The Atlas of Boston History, edited by Seasholes and published by the University of Chicago Press, joins the bookshelf with its 191 large-format, lavishly illustrated pages. To paraphrase Tip O'Neill, long-term Boston politician and Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives who famously stated that “all politics is local,” all architectural history is local, so it is important to have good maps.Seasholes and her thirty-five contributors have produced a wonderfully useful document that all students of Boston will want to acquire. The vertically oriented, large-format atlas (11¼ by 14¼ inches) is organized chronologically around eleven historical periods, from the retreat of the last Ice Age until 2010. Each of the eleven sections begins with a brief introduction, followed by subsections developed by Seasholes's team; a total of fifty-seven subsections cover specific historical categories. Each of these includes its own introduction and double-page spreads of multiple modern and historical maps and attendant graphs and charts, annotated to support the historical issues defined in the subsection. Architecture plays a supportive role through sidebars featuring selected photographs and line drawings based on historic images that transform buildings into social and cultural markers. As Seasholes explains in her preface, the team of scholars “decided that the emphasis of the atlas should be on the physical development of Boston and its infrastructure, economic changes, the various demographic groups that have populated the city, and social and cultural developments more than on political events” (ix).As with any project involving so many contributors, it must have proved a challenge for Seasholes to maintain a consistent balance between the section and subsection introductions and the more detailed discussions that follow. Often the inclusion of many distinct voices can be enlightening for readers, as different authors shift the discussion in new directions. Here the narrative introductions for the sections and the text for the plates provide extensive and valuable information in a focused and concise manner. Seasholes plays an important part in this work, contributing to nineteen of the seventy introductions and plate descriptions. Her contributions on landmaking, water and sewage systems, and transportation networks serve as the essential backbone for the overall text. The book also reflects the editor's sustained effort to show in its many modern maps the correct relationship of land to water throughout the centuries, an important issue in a city where so much was built on landfill. Seasholes's descriptions of methods of landfill are essential reading for any student of Boston history, archaeology, or architecture.The other contributors represent a broad spectrum in terms of ages, disciplines, and professions, from very senior academics to independent scholars and graduate students, and they offer a broad diversity of perspectives on the city. For example, Mark Peterson's sections on the colonial era in Boston, and especially the period 1740–60, display a wide-ranging understanding of the economics and politics of the area where Boston merchants operated and flourished. Jim Vrabel, author of A People's History of the New Boston (2014), should be commended for foregrounding the names of many grassroots community organizers who fought for better lives and better neighborhoods in the second half of the twentieth century.2 Reading through the titles of the book's subsections—“First Inhabitants,” “Boston and the Slave Trade,” “Railroad Development,” “Abolitionist Movement,” “Relocation to the Suburbs,” and more—gives a quick sense of the riches found therein.What joys specific plates can provide, prompting new understandings of moments in time and places in the metropolis. Plate 10 is a fine example of such an eye-opener, juxtaposing two images from 1743: a map of Boston by William Price (an updated version of the John Bonner map of 1722, not illustrated) and a panoramic view of the Boston skyline by William Burgis. Scholars have carefully located the buildings that can be identified in the panorama on the accompanying map. One might wish for a more complete listing of these buildings, identifying themand their sites with their full names rather than just color codes for building types and church denominations, but here perhaps I am being greedy, since this volume is not an atlas of architectural history. The back pages of the atlas include suggested sources related to each plate, sources for illustrations, and occasionally quite detailed biographical and other information, such as on the figures included in the women's history tour of Boston. Within this mix, Seasholes includes chronologies for the water, sewage, and transportation sections that are her specialty.Sprinkled throughout the “Additional Information” section at the back of the atlas are chronologies of Boston population growth and decline over time. Although the editor and her team decided to de-emphasize “political history,” I would argue that it would have been helpful also to include lists of names and dates for the leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the colonial governors under its reformed charter, the leaders of the town meeting period of governance, and the mayors of Boston from the early nineteenth century forward.Given Boston's identity as the “city on a hill” originally founded by immigrants determined to achieve religious freedom, it is curious that religion itself is rarely mentioned in this volume. The early impact of the Puritan theocracy, the later dominance of Unitarianism, and the powerful role of Catholicism in the city for many decades are noted in passing, but their influence on the landscape could be recorded in greater detail. Further, while urban renewal receives substantial attention, the text makes no mention of the role of the historic preservation movement in creating the multiple historic districts that came to define the city from the 1950s onward. As Boston is now a minority-majority city, a more prominent discussion of the emergence, locations, and migrations of AfricanAmerican, Latinx, and Asian American populations should be foregrounded in any future revisions.Despite these few shortcomings, this volume is enormously useful and will become a standard text for anyone writing about the city and its metropolitan surrounds. The Atlas of Boston History provides valuable answers to so many questions that all scholarship is lifted by its existence, and the fact that it was awarded the 2020 Historic New England Book Prize should surprise no one. This work crowns many years of effort by a devoted team of scholars.