Dirty Old Boston

Download or read book Dirty Old Boston written by Jim Botticelli and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-05-01 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Jim Botticelli launched the Dirty Old Boston Facebook page as a salute to the gritty city he once knew, he discovered that thousands of people were equally nostalgic and curious about Boston's recent past. And for good reason; after World War II, Boston changed rapidly, without apology, for better and worse, and in many ways forever.Dirty Old Boston chronicles the people, streets, and buildings from the postwar years to 1987. From ball games to dive bars, Dirty Old Boston also covers some of the city's most tumultuous events including the razing of neighborhoods, Boston's busing crisis, and the continual fight for affordable housing.Photographs—assembled from family albums, student projects, institutional archives, and professional collections—reveal Boston as seen from the streets. Illuminating Boston's tenacity and spirit, Dirty Old Boston presents our proud moments and our growing pains. Raw and beautiful, this book is an evocative tribute to the city and its people.

Download or read book A People's Guide to Greater Boston written by Joseph Nevins and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Herein, we bring you to sites that have been central to the lives of 'the people' of Greater Boston over four centuries. You'll visit sites associated with the area's indigenous inhabitants and with the individuals and movements who sought to abolish slavery, to end war, challenge militarism, and bring about a more peaceful world, to achieve racial equity, gender justice, and sexual liberation, and to secure the rights of workers. We take you to some well-known sites, but more often to ones far off the well-beaten path of the Freedom Trail, to places in Boston's outlying neighborhoods. We also visit sites in numerous other municipalities that make up the Greater Boston region-from places such as Lawrence, Lowell and Lynn to Concord and Plymouth. The sites to which we do 'travel' include homes given that people's struggles, activism, and organizing sometimes unfold, or are even birthed in many cases in living rooms and kitchens. Trying to capture a place as diverse and dynamic as Boston is highly challenging. (One could say that about any 'big' place.) We thus want to make clear that our goal is not to be comprehensive, or to 'do justice' to the region. Given the constraints of space and time as well as the limitations of knowledge--both our own and what is available in published form--there are many important sites, cities, and towns that we have not included. Thus, in exploring scores of sites across Boston and numerous municipalities, our modest goal is to paint a suggestive portrait of the greater urban area that highlights its long-contested nature. In many ways, we merely scratch the region's surface--or many surfaces--given the multiple layers that any one place embodies. In writing about Greater Boston as a place, we run the risk of suggesting that the city writ-large has some sort of essence. Indeed, the very notion of a particular place assumes intrinsic characteristics and an associated delimited space. After all, how can one distinguish one place from another if it has no uniqueness and is not geographically differentiated? Nonetheless, geographer Doreen Massey insists that we conceive of places as progressive, as flowing over the boundaries of any particular space, time, or society; in other words, we should see places as processual or ever-changing, as unbounded in that they shape and are shaped by other places and forces from without, and as having multiple identities. In exploring Greater Boston from many venues over 400 years, we embrace this approach. That said, we have to reconcile this with the need to delimit Greater Boston--for among other reasons, simply to be in a position to name it and thus distinguish it from elsewhere"--

Download or read book Inside the Combat Zone written by Stephanie Schorow and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-08-01 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Boston has always been known for its stiff character. So how did this great New England city become home to one of the largest and most notorious adult entertainment districts in the nation? In this expertly crafted history, veteran reporter Stephanie Schorow teases out the issues that created this controversial neighborhood, giving voice to the players who sought to tame or profit from the sleaze snaking its way through Boston. At turns comic and tragic, Schorow introduces us to the politicians, exotic dancers, and wise guys, and residents brought together by the adult entertainment district—a five-acre neighborhood the city engineered to contain the very porno plague it wanted to eliminate. (Meet the nun-turned-attorney who advocated for the First Amendment rights of adult bookstores, a dancer called “the thinking man's stripper,” and Boston's unofficial city censor.) For these people and thousands of others, the Combat Zone is more than a memory—it was a life-altering adventure.

Download or read book Political Waters written by Eric Jay Dolin and published by Univ of Massachusetts Press. This book was released on 2008-04 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Boston Harbor served as a colonial gateway to the world, witnessed the Boston Tea Party, and helped the community transform itself from an outpost of a few hardy settlers into a bustling metropolis and self-proclaimed hub of the universe. Yet for hundreds of years Boston Harbor was also a cesspool. Long before Bostonians dumped tea into the harbor to protest English taxes, they dumped sewage there. As the Boston area grew and prospered, its sewage problems worsened, as did the harbor's health, to the point where in the 1980s it was considered the most polluted harbor in the country and ridiculed as the harbor of shame. Then, in one of the most impressive environmental comebacks in American history, Boston Harbor was dramatically cleaned up. All it took was two lawsuits, two courts, dozens of lawyers, the creation of a powerful sewage authority, thousands of workers, millions of labor hours, and billions of dollars. Sewage management is rarely as compelling and exciting as higher profile environmental issues such as global climate change, preserving endangered species, or protecting tropical rainforests. But it can be, as Eric Jay Dolin shows in this engaging narrative account. Boston's struggle to deal with its sewage is an epic story of failure and success, replete with colorful characters, political, bureaucratic, and legal twists and turns, engineering feats, and massive amounts of money. In the end, success hinged on the often overlooked yet monumentally important act of responsibly disposing of the waste people produce every day.

Download or read book Dirty Love written by Andre Dubus and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2013-10-07 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of short stories examining the lives of suburbanites seeking solace and gratification in food, sex, work, and love.

Download or read book Faithful written by Stewart O'Nan and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2005-09-06 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now in paperback, two fiercely avid Red Sox fans document one of the most eagerly anticipated baseball seasons of all time. From devoted fans O'Nan and King comes this unique chronicle of one baseball team's journey from spring training to post-season play.

Download or read book In the Shadow of the Hawk written by Josephine B. Curry and published by University Press of America. This book was released on 2004 with total page 594 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book carries the reader back to the early years of World War II. It is centered on an insightful American woman's daily experience, recorded in her diary from 1939 to 1942, wherein personal reflections and epic thrust yield an intriguing sense of plot. Author Lester Bartson draws on many external sources in order to bring to life the diarist's interesting native city of Canton, Ohio, her subsequent service as a WAC during the liberation of France, and postwar initiatives in Nova Scotia. Bartson uses recently discovered original material to piece together the poignant story of her husband, a Canadian RAF pilot during the First World War. Historical and cultural issues are given perspective by richly interactive notes, a broadly based Introduction, reflective Epilogue, thematic Index, and more than fifty individual illustrations.