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This important contribution to scholarship in social science history examines the development of public education in nineteenth-century Massachusetts. Until the 1950s educational historians emphasized the relationship of schooling to the political system and the development of a common American culture. In recent years a social history perspective has emerged that stresses the socioeconomic influences that tie education to other institutions and processes in society rather than to political ideals. Carl Kaestle's and Maris Vinovskis's study is firmly grounded in this newer perspective. However, their work questions the adequacy of any single-factor explanation of the broad educational changes that occurred during this period - whether it be the emergence of factory production or the broader concept of modernization. They argue that these educational changes were the result of the complex interaction of cultural, demographic and economic variables operating in varying ways in different communities over time. Ethnicity, religion, urban status, the occupational structure, income distribution and wealth of the community all emerge as significant factors in this interaction.
This book reconstructs important milestones in the lives of 2,808 white, native-born men who resided in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1860 or 1870. Selected systematically from the census for those two years, these men represent two cross-sections of those viewed by contemporaries as "typical" Bostonians. Using a broad array of sources--manuscript census returns; tax assessments; city directories; birth, marriage, and death records for more than twenty states; cemetery records; newspapers; and family genealogies--Peter Knights traced these men not only back to their origins in hundreds of small New England towns but also (for those who left) onward from Boston. He determined changes in their occupations and wealth and after they arrived in Boston, the fates of their marriages, their production of children, and--in all but seventy cases--their deaths and the causes thereof. The result is a comprehensive quantitative study of important aspects of the lives of what are probably the largest sample population groups for any North American community.
Boston was well-known in the nineteenth century as a center for intellectual ferment. Amidst the popular lecturing of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the discussion groups led by Margaret Fuller sat a remarkable young woman, Caroline Healey Dall (18221912): transcendentalist, early feminist, writer, reformer, and, perhaps most importantly, active diarist. During the seventy-five years that Dall kept a diary, she captured all the fascinating details of her sometimes agonizing personal life, and she also wrote about all the major figures who surrounded her. Her diary, filling forty-five volumes, is perhaps the longest diary ever written by any American and the most complete account of a nineteenth-century woman"s life. Daughter of Boston is a selection of the best from Dall"s diary, woven together with biographical narrative. What Samuel Pepys did in his Diary for seventeenth-century London, Caroline Dall does in hers for nineteenth-century Boston. The city"s celebrations, mob scenes, poverty-ridden neighborhoods, lectures, and exhibits are described with great wit and insight. Dall also writes colorfully about people whose names never made it into the history books-wives and mothers, fugitives, servants, children, and working people of all ages. Daughter of Boston is both a significant document of social history and an engrossing account of one woman"s life and thoughts. "In Daughter of Boston, Helen Deese, one of our foremost scholars of American Romanticism, has unearthed the fascinating journals of Caroline Healey Dall, a nineteenth-century New Englander who was an astute observer and active participant in nearly every major intellectual and political movement of her day, from Transcendentalism to abolition to women"s rights." -Megan Marshall, author of The Peabody Sisters
A fascinating look at the people, politics, and technology behind the massive landfill project that filled Boston's Back Bay