A People's Guide to Greater Boston

Joseph Nevins, Suren Moodliar, and Eleni Macrakis, A People's Guide to Greater Boston (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020), 313 pp., $24.95

I first received this book as a gift; I was told it was a perfect book for me. Strangely, a few days later I was asked to write a review of it. The synchronicity told me I could not pass up such a request.

Within minutes of receiving the book I looked it over. Instantly I was reminded of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Writers’ Project State Guide Series of the 1930s, which I have always loved. Then in reading a few random pages I was reminded of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. I took a few more minutes and noticed maps and directions to visit sites of historic significance. When a few days later I agreed to review this work, I did the right thing and read the introduction. The introduction itself sets the mind of the reader to take a fresh, deep, and more critical look at the impact of the English settlements on the preexisting Indigenous population.

Institutional oppression of indentured servants, laborers, and slaves, was already ingrained in Pilgrim and Puritan culture. The area’s first Puritan Governor John Winthrop and others of the landed gentry class saw poverty – and the need for the destitute to submit to the powerful and wealthy – simply as God's plan. Soon after a few footholds were in place, the Indigenous people throughout New England, with their 10,000-year-old culture, came to be treated as non-equals who needed to be Christianized or forced out of the way by law or violence.

This is the true origin story of Massachusetts that I only learned after high school.

With this fresh understanding of Greater Boston's beginnings, I recognize in myself and in a vast majority of US citizens that from generation to generation the history we learned in schools set us up to be too complacent, accepting, and even submitting to unjust forces of wealth and political power who still believe that God’s plan or capitalism's demand gives them unquestionable authority.

Being reminded of how it really was and how it relates to what still is, should motivate any reader to awaken, engage, and challenge injustice in all its forms and to reject the claims of people who see themselves as superior.

The book moves through time and place beginning at Boston and spreading throughout the area south to Plymouth, west to Concord and north to Lowell, Haverhill, and Newburyport. Photographs, lithographs, and maps enhance all stories. Nothing this book covers is left to obscurity.

We see a photo of the still standing home of William Lloyd Garrison in Newburyport and read about the devastating loss of his father when he was 8, while he worked as an apprentice shoemaker in Lynn; then as a teenager, composed enough to be apprenticed to the editor of the Newburyport Herald; and then, after the passing of his mother before he was 18, how self-reliant he must have become.

Stories like this remind me of what an 86-year-old cowboy told me about his father's life experience of those times; he said, "Boys was men in those days." 

Who knew that the giant mounds of salt used to de-ice every Massachusetts municipality and highway are stored in Chelsea and that the salt comes from Chile's Atacama Desert, Africa, and Asia? On page 190 you will discover that such consolidated storage of salt and many other substances creates health issues. All too often, dangers to local people are overlooked or put aside for profit's sake, confused by standards of cost-benefit analysis. Why is it only when the local people become aware of such dangers that questions like "Whose profit?" arise?

On pages 171-72, I learned from historian Ray Raphael that the American Revolution probably began in 1774 when citizens across Massachusetts forced British officials from their office and homes. Raphael contends that the battles at Lexington and Concord, and at Bunker Hill were British attempts "to regain control of a colony they had already lost."

In this book you can begin anywhere, letting your interests lead, finding stories of people who worked together or alone, creatively rising against inherent oppression. There are wins, losses, outright heartbreak, stories of racism, labor union struggle, and political repression (like the Sacco and Vanzetti case), all followed with directions of how to get to those places where history was written, as well as suggestions for further reading. 

This book makes history intimate, showing how we must be constantly vigilant against every attempt at depriving us of a quality of life worth working for. Reading this book should inspire and hopefully empower. It does more than scratch the surface. If this book causes you to think of a story and ask, "Why didn't they tell us that one?," maybe you should tell it. Maybe you should write it.

Robert Smith^*
Arlington, Massachusetts
minimumwageart@gmail.com