Massachusetts Books

I had heard a lot about the author's work from a friend of mine, but hadn't had an opppurtunity to read him. Finally I managed to secure this book, and I must say it is excellent. The book is primarily a collection of essays which the author writes from his own experiences. He is a countryman who has moved to the city and describes his dilemmas of living in a city as compared to the country, and the adventures he has, as he goes along making friends and understanding people in the city. There is nothing melodramatic in this work, however it is excellent literature. The author's style is superb and as you read the essays, you get a feel of the cosy atmosphere of the country and the warmth and simplicity of human relationships, which is what most of us crave for but somehow overlook. In his essays Grayson brings out simple but most profound truths about people and the process of living in general. After reading it one can't help but get the feeling that human relationships are so true, simple and beautiful. All that is required is an open, kind, friendly and fearless mind, so that we can understand (as Grayson says)and thus be at peace and in harmony with nature, ourselves, others and life in general. Overall an extremely charming, enjoyable and enlightening read.

From back cover:

"Written by leading scholars of African American and women's history, the essays in this volume seek to reconceptualize the political history of black women in the United States by placing them 'at the center of our thinking.'

The book explores how slavery, racial discrimination, and gender shaped the goals that African American women set for themselves, their families, and their race and looks at the political tools at their disposal. By identifying key turning points for black women, the essays create a new chronology and a new paradigm for historical analysis. The chronology beings in 1837 with the interracial meeting of antislavery women in New York City and concludes with the civil rights movement of the 1960s."

Contents:

* African American Women and the Vote: An Overview (R. Terborg-Penn)

* Architects of a Vision: Black Women and Their Antebellum Quest for Political and Social Equality (Willi Coleman)

* Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: Abolitionist and Feminist Reformer (B. Collier-Thomas)

* To Catch the Vision of Freedom: Reconstructing Southern Black Women's Political History, 1865-1880 (Elsa Barkely-Brown)

* The Quest for Justice: African American Women Litigants (Janice Sumler-Edmond)

* Advancement of the Race through African American Women's Organizations in the South, 1895-1925 (Cynthia Neverdon-Morton)

* Clubwomen and Electoral Politics in the 1920s (Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham)

* From Progressive Republican to Independent Progressive: The Political Career of Charlotta A. Bass (Gerald R. Gill)

* Shining in the Dark: Black Women and the Struggle for the Vote, 1955-1965 (Martha Prescod Norman)

* Directions for Scholarship (Bettina Aptheker)

The oft-difficult to find poetry of Robert Francis is included in this nice collection. Hopefully the publishing companies will realize that the poetry lovers out there will appreciate more Robert Francis.

From thousands of court cases in Essex, Middlesex, and Suffolk Counties, Massachusetts, dating from 1636 to 1700, Melinde Sanborn has extracted the names of all deponents and witnesses whose ages are given in the court records of those counties. Depositions provided in early court records are among the richest sources of personal information surviving from New England's first century, and Ms. Sanborn argues that "so many people in early New England were deponents for one reason or another that no biography or genealogy can be complete without a search through court records to see if a pertinent deposition exists."

For this early period, the single most useful bit of evidence included in the depositions is the age of the deponent. While most depositions vary in quality from being virtually useless to providing corroboration of marriages, wills, and deeds, ages alone provide incontrovertible value to the genealogist. Sometimes the age of a deponent was very important to a particular case. Men over sixty, for example, were often brought into court to support the claims of the ancient boundaries of litigants' property. Likewise, many older women who were experienced midwives were called upon to offer opinions on the timeliness of a birth in a fornication case.

Also, one of the most common errors in genealogical work is confusing two or more individuals of the same name. If senior or junior or tertius is not used, it is very difficult to assign events to the correct individual. Frequently, fathers and sons with the same given name came to court together, but with stated ages they are easily differentiated. Men with the same name and of the same generation can be another problem, but again a deposition with a specific age given can make all the difference.

With this index--which lists the names and ages of 11,000 deponents, and the year and source of the court records--researchers can quickly determine whether it is worthwhile to track down the original court record.

Boston, America's London, is such an awesome ensemble of urban architecture that any author is presented with both a formidable task and the enjoyment of endless variation. With such an enormous canvas, the resulting work can be either a sloppy, undisciplined patchwork or a masterpiece. This little book is a masterpiece.

What can I say? It's exactly what an AIA-sponsored architecture catalog should be. The selection of sites is diverse, interesting and distinguished. The essays for each site are complete: They're long enough to be instructive and short enough to keep your attention. The photographs are all monochrome, but they're large, numerous and of revealing composition as to add real value to the text. There's no long introductory essay, but a simple preface to introduce the city and the book, and there's a nice set of simple, functional maps in the appendices.

The binding and the pages are sturdy to allow for hands-on field work as well as browsing. In many ways, this book resembles the AIA Guide to Detroit, which is also a benchmark for the AIA-sponsored series.

As for the architecture... Anyone familiar with Boston and the surrounding towns knows that there are thousands of noteworthy sites. This book captures about 600 of the best of them, and your favorite sites are sure to be in here, be they buildings, parks or public artwork. Since historic sites play such an important role in Boston's urban cohesion, they are appropriately represented here. Important modern structures aren't neglected either. In fact, Boston includes a real critical mass of fascinating modern buildings, all appropriately included as well.

Surprising to me is that Boston contains less colonial and Federal architecture than one might expect from its reputation and history as a colonial metropolis. There are few dense areas of unspoiled colonial or Federal urbanism, Beacon Hill and Charlestown being the obvious exceptions; rather, colonial and Federal sites tend to be widely distributed throughout the modern city. Maybe I'm just stating the obvious, but the city doesn't have the cohesive historical atmosphere and quaint sensuality of places like Charleston, South Carolina and Providence, Rhode Island, for example. It's more like Washington, DC, with its historic enclaves at Georgetown and Alexandria. That's not a bad thing, of course, but just an observation. Boston has its share of fire, neglect and urban renewal nightmares too, as this guide carefully notes. Two inexplicable omissions: Harvard Business School and the Radcliffe College buildings. Fenway, with its mindboggling cluster of important institutions, gets a bit of the short end as well.

The catalog stays largely focused within the Boston city limits, but there are nice, (almost) complete excursions to Harvard, MIT and the neighborhoods surrounding those important institutions. Each chapter begins with a brief essay describing the history, general character and orientation of the particular neighborhood, and many important historic streets and public spaces are discussed within.

If you're an architectural historian, architect, preservationist, serious enthusiast or cultural tourist, your architecture library is incomplete without this one.

This book about Boston and Old Scollay Square was a wonderfully entertaining read. It is a well-organized and researched history of a section of Boston that from colonial times to the present has experienced change and upheaval mirroring on a smaller scale what has happened in our nation and around the world. From Revolutionary war heroes and Yankee blue-bloods to burlesque stars and government bureaucrats, Scollay Square has seen it all -- and this book captures all the sights and sounds

This research monograph utilizes narrative analysis to understand how race, class, and gender interact in the lives of women who have achieved elite positions as school superintendents. Chase shows how comfort and discomfort in telling parts of their stories of achievement and discrimination reflect the sometimes subtle constraints on these women in power positions. This book is many things: a cutting edge example of social science methodology, a work of scholarship on women who have achieved an uncommon degree of power and to whom researchers have not traditionally had access, and an analytical examination of the processes of power, constraint, empowerment and resistance. This book could be studied in gender courses, courses in qualitative methodology, and the field of educational administration. It is particularly useful in widening the horizons of ambition for women who have opted for teaching as a career. The examples of these superintendents show how how traditional feminine interests in nurturance and community welfare can be expanded to include more powerful roles, even as the challenges facing these women are daunting.

A handy sized, informative guide to rivers in our area. We have used this to plan numerous trips on rivers and have found the guide to be (relatively) accurate and easy to use. Having said that, we discovered (duh!) that rivers change over time and that this guide is a great STARTING point for trip planning. Good scouting and maybe talking to people with experience on the river in question are valuable parts of good trip prep. There is a website for the book where people can submit changes or inaccuracies that they have discovered - this helps to keep the guide current. All in all one of the best we've looked at.

This is one of my favorite hiking guides for the Boston area -- varied hikes, easy maps, mostly accurate. Crane Beach and Halibut Point are two of the prettiest places in New England & shouldn't be missed.

In focusing on the writings of the mid-1900's women writers Dorothy Canfield, Jessie Fauset, Pearl Buck, and Josephine Herbst, Harker wants to establish a link between women writers of the pre-Civil War era, notably Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the women writers of the 1970s associated with the feminist movement. The women writers of the mid-1900s were for the most part disregarded or marginalized by critics and the public in the frenetic, masculine-charged contemporary modernist culture. Herbst discloses, however, that the four writers were in fact more in touch with the interests and values of the mainstream than the authors and artists who attracted the most attention at the time for their novel styles and in some cases, outlandish behavior. Harker is an assistant professor of English at the University of Mississippi.

The author sees in Dorothy Canfield an urge for reform. This writer also had a role in helping to put women's periodicals on a sound commercial footing so they could survive; and in surviving, unintentionally serve as examples for the greater number and variety of women's magazines to come in following decades. In contrast to the participants in urban phenomenon of the Harlem Renaissance, Jessie Fauset addressed the "authentic" black middle class largely invisible despite its size in being repressed by racism. Pearl Buck's most popular novels set in China with average Chinese persons as main characters promoted peaceable international relations and suggested a universal humanity bound with a liberal political spirit and principles. Rejecting the middle-class life style, Josephine Herbst nevertheless remained attached to it by her wicked satires of its moral failures, sham respectability, and tepid emotions.

Though none of the writers was celebrated (such as Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda), that they had some success at all as writers attests to the presence of a cohesive, vibrant middle-class society during a period when Promethean architectural projects, political mass movements, and avant-garde artists commanded the spotlight. Though Canfield and the others had to some degree colorful, contrarian lives which could hold lessons for other women, they did not write about themselves, but instead wrote in ways which illuminated the situations, prospects, outlooks, and hopes of their mostly middle-class readers disregarded by the modernists. With the four women writers and their subjects and their approaches to them, Harker throws light on the interlocking threads of the era's middle-class culture; and in so doing, brings out parts of modern culture which have generally been unrealized or ignored.