North Of Boston Research Articles

The origin of the playground: The role of the Boston women's clubs, 1885–1890

Abstract The Massachusetts Emergency and Hygiene Association established the first playground in the United States at the Parmenter‐Street Chapel in Boston's North End. This historical study explores primary sources that have not been presented heretofore in the body of literature related to the development of playgrounds in the United States. The growth of these playgrounds occurred a decade before Joseph Lee's involvement in using playgrounds as a social tool for “Americanizing” immigrants.

The social costs of transportation control plans

This paper presents the results of a research project which examined some of these issues by simulating the effects of various TCP proposals on work travel for Boston's North Shore. A multinomial logit model of travel demand was used to predict traveler responses and changes in consumer's surplus. For transit improvement strategies, costs were computed with a process model. These models were employed to predict the monetized value of welfare losses and gains of the TCP strategies. Inferences about the effects of TCP on urban form were made based on the welfare change calculations. This analysis attempts to determine the costs of current political constraints which limit the set of feasible TCP strategies.

Frost's "Sound of Sense" and a Popular Audience

ROBERT FROST, forty years old, returned from England to America in February I9I5. Flushed with the triumphant reception of A Boy's Will (19I3) and North of Boston (1914) in England, he had been flatteringly welcomed by influential Boston literati. Being a celebrity delighted Frost; but it did not provide him with an income. Leaving Boston for New Hampshire's White Mountains where he could live cheaply, Frost, late that spring, moved to a modest farm outside Franconia. The house, too small for the family, was scantily furnished and in some disrepair. Months after they had moved in, soup was ladled out from an earthen mixing bowl; packing cases served as extra chairs; a door was off its hinges.! A lackadaisical farmer, Frost racked his brain to find a way to make money that would free him for poetry. Earlier he had hit on the idea of bardings, returned to it again, and sent out feelers to his friends. One such friend was a twenty-five-year-old English teacher, Sidney Cox, who had been graduated from Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, in June I9II. That fall he had begun his teaching career at the high school in Plymouth, New Hampshire, where he met Frost, an instructor at the New Hampshire State Normal School. Cox, sincere and idealistic, looking for a hero to worship, ended his search with Frost. The next year, Frost left Plymouth for England; and Cox enrolled at the University of Illinois to earn his Master's degree. But the friendship of the two men was strengthened by a continuous correspondence for the next three years. When Frost returned home in I9I5, he invited Cox to enjoy the

Psychotherapy in the Goldfish Bowl

The therapeutic advantages and liabilities that accrue to the indigenous therapist (be he professional or paraprofessional) because of the indigenous state were explored, utilizing the five-year experience of ten indigenous therapists in Boston's North End. The current and historical proximity of therapists who live in the same neighborhood as their patients do provides both with increased access to, longitudinal knowledge about, and a blurred role concept of the other that may help or hinder the therapeutic process. Similarities in culture and values can foster alliance formation, differentiation of psychopathology, and therapeutic interventions, but also may interfere when therapy abuts culturally shared blind spots. These data are relevant to the private general psychiatrist as an indigenous therapist in non-metropolitan America.

Two Mobs of Jacksonian Boston: Ideology and Interest

THE 1830s were a decade of heightened concern with order and disorder in the United States. Immigrants, arriving in large numbers, threatened the basic homogeneity cherished by many Americans. These newcomers crowded into decaying urban sections like Boston's North End and Fort Hill. Poverty, crime, and disease were on the rise. Sectional tensions were evident, and they were exacerbated by the agitation of the abolitionists. Mob of various motivations-religious, ethnic, and ideological-was increasing. Mayor Samuel A. Eliot of Boston noticed a spirit of violence abroad in the city and in the nation.' In America, an ideal of order has coexisted with a reality of disorder.2 The nation was born of revolution (the very essence of disorder), yet its people have continually prized order and regularity to temper the flux and uncertainty of their lives. Historians have thus far only described such tensions. To explain them,

Man and Wife: The Dialogue of Contraries in Robert Frost's Poetry

T HE VOLUME OF ROBERT FROST'S POETRY entitled Complete Poems (1949) covers his varied production from before the turn of this century up through his poetic drama, The Masque of Mercy (I947). Even a casual reading shows that Frost's poetry is not homogeneous in form and subject matter. The self-conscious lyrics of A Boy's Will (1913) give way to the dialogues of country folk in North of Boston (I914) and the urbane and witty poems of the following years. Critics have shown alarm in dealing with the poetry of Frost as a whole, for many fail to recognize any line of continuity in this varied collection. Thus Frost has been accused of lacking a consistent point of view and of rejecting out of hand all firm systems of human value. George W. Nitchie compares him unfavorably on this point with his contemporaries Yeats and Eliot.

: The Early Jewish Community of Boston's North End: A Sociologically Oriented Study of an Eastern European Jewish Immigrant Community in an American Big-City Neighborhood between 1870 and 1900 . Arnold A. Wieder.

: The Early Jewish Community of Boston's North End: A Sociologically Oriented Study of an Eastern European Jewish Immigrant Community in an American Big-City Neighborhood between 1870 and 1900 . Arnold A. Wieder.

An Outbreak of Influenza a in a Boys' School

FOLLOWING the Christmas vacation of 1945–1946, there were admitted to the infirmary of a boys' school of about 680 boarding students, located thirty miles north of Boston, several boys with "colds" characterized by enough malaise so that the patients willingly sought medical advice. After hospitalization of the first patient 30 patients were admitted for upper respiratory infections during the next ten days, 138 more during the second ten-day period and 46 more during the third ten days. The outbreak then subsided. The epidemiologic data are presented graphically in Figure 1.Clinical AspectsThese illnesses of the respiratory tract were diagnosed clinically as . . .