Jane Kamensky's Reading List

"John Winthrop keeps a journal from the time that he journeys over in 1629/1630. It’s one of the most complete and detailed records that we have of those first decades of the plantation, this separate colony. He’s an extremely keen-eyed observer, which is characteristic of Puritans as a highly literate and self-scrutinising people. In their theology the more smug you are about your own salvation, the less likely you are to be one of God’s elect. Puritans are forever searching themselves for portents of their own destiny, which tends to make many of them very good observers; Winthrop is one of those. He’s also in a position of civil leadership for much of the period of his journal. The Journal of John Winthrop is as interesting for the things that he doesn’t want us to think about as for the things that he does. We do see some of his ideas about order and propriety and righteousness in the organisation of the city, but we also see the city’s ties to markets around the English Atlantic, including to slave markets. It’s from Winthrop that we learn about the first enslaved people who come to New England from the Caribbean. We see a tremendous amount about relationships with indigenous communities. Much of this material, through our twenty-first century eyes, reflects quite poorly on the Puritan project. Much of what we know about early tensions over radical Protestantism—the things that put the lie to the myth of seeking religious toleration—come from Winthrop. He talks about the need to winnow out the people whose beliefs are purer than the Puritans. There’s a natural drama to what he shows readers about planting a colony on the seventeenth century equivalent of the moon. The day-to-day wear-and-tear of it. His journal gives a terrific sense of the fabric of the city, of how fragile the enterprise often was, its internal contradictions, its lofty goals and its more prosaic daily realities. He’s a poignant documenter of his moment. It’s obligatory to state what Winthrop himself did so much efface: Boston is built on the land of Wampanoag peoples, which was expropriated by the English. As soon as the English plantation that becomes Boston establishes itself in the 1630s, it is a pretty strongly English place until the first big wave of Irish, German Palatinate and some French Huguenot immigration in the second decade of the eighteenth century. The other different thing that distinguishes Boston from New York or Philadelphia and also the reason that its demographic profile is ethnically stable, is that as Winthrop said, “the eyes of all the world were upon them” until the English Civil War of 1642, at which point a lot of reformed Protestants want to stay and fight it out in England in the Civil War, and then in the Commonwealth period. So, it’s not a place of huge in-migration until the second quarter of the eighteenth century. It grew mostly by natural increase for a much longer time than polyglot New York or parts of the colonies that had more direct relationships with the transatlantic slave trade. Although Boston has a foundational and enduring relationship with slavery, for the most part it is not a direct debarkation point for transatlantic shipping; its relationship with slavery is much more mediated by the Caribbean colonies. There are people of African descent here from the end of the 1630s. But you wouldn’t have heard large varieties of African languages on the streets of Boston as you would have, say, in Charleston."

"Jim and Lois Horton’s Black Bostonians is one of the foundational texts of the new social history of the 1970s. They publish a couple of years after the famous quartet of community studies that traces the social demographic fabric of New England towns like Andover, Dedham, Winthrop (which I mentioned a few minutes ago) and others. The Hortons go after a different quarry, and with it, a different story. They want to know about the non-white community—the community of African and African-descended people—in a city on a hill. The thing that I admire so much about the book is how much blood they’re able to squeeze from really stony documents. They give us a sense of the sounds, sights and textures of daily life for some of the poorest people in the city, from records that, if you looked at them, would seem to tell you nothing. From city directories that give us occupations, from tax assessments that tell us who’s living on a block. From these really humble materials, they tell the story of the vitality and resistance of a relatively small black community, the infighting between Afro-Bostonians and the wave of Irish immigration that came in the 1820s and really picked up in the 1840s—this competition for scarce resources at the bottom of the economic ladder. Some of the under-history of Boston’s abolitionist thought, with the daily lives of free people and their own community, and a wonderful social geography of the city, too. I’ve had the experience this week of reading Horton side by side with Common Ground , which I had never done before, and thinking this is really the pre-history of the busing crisis of the 1970s, just as it’s also the pre-history or the history of the Massachusetts 54th Civil War regiment that’s so famous. There’s a lot of humble, everyday glory in the stories that the Hortons are able to dredge up. It’s just a quite miraculous piece of research, especially for its time. Relative to the rest of the Anglophone world, women are extraordinarily well-educated in New England. That is a post-Puritan legacy. For families to read the Bible in its vernacular editions and instruct their children in piety is an important article in civic faith. Women in Boston and Massachusetts and New England more broadly are much more literate than they would have been in almost any other place in the English-speaking world—by orders of magnitude over London, say. There are educated women here from the very beginning. Some of the first writing that advocates for women in civic life by people like Judith Sargent Murray in published writings and by Abigail Adams in private writings, like Susanna Rowson in one of the first American novels. It’s not an accident that so much of that energy comes out of Boston. Anglo-women do continue to play an important role in the cultural life of the city up through Isabella Stewart Gardner’s time. And not just Anglo-women. It’s quite logical that Phyllis Wheatley, one of our first published non-white women poets, is published in Boston, where the faith commitments of the people who owned and eventually would free her favoured women being educated to a degree. A patronage network of evangelicals saw her book into print. So yes, it is a place of relative female achievement. The Common School movement that begins in the early nineteenth-century educates boys and girls alike, although not identically. Sure. The Exchange Artist tackles the rise and fall of a financial and architectural scheme in the first and second decades of the nineteenth century. A man named Andrew Dexter, one of the commercial booster types that innovate disastrously across the early republic, engages in a dodgy paper money scheme in order to build a seven-storey skyscraper. It’s a temple to Mammon in the heart of Puritan Boston; built beside the city’s first church, it cast the old State House in shadow. It’s a comeuppance story in a lot of ways. Building a seven-storey building in a town of five-storey fire hoses and ladders turns out to be a mistake; it burns a mere ten years after completion, providing nineteenth-century commentators about speculation and excess with a large metaphor that they play with for about a hundred years."

"Common Ground is one of the great books of the twentieth century. As a matter of craft, it’s a foundational text of rigorous longform narrative journalism—one that gets at so much that resonates with the racial tensions of our own time, even though it’s written about a time almost exactly fifty years in the past. “ Common Ground is one of the great books of the twentieth century.” Through intensive interviewing, J. Anthony Lukas tells the story of America in the twentieth century, especially late twentieth-century Boston, through three families: a Harvard-educated white do-gooder of Protestant dissent, a Charlestown-based white Catholic family, and an aspiring African-American family from Roxbury who seek to realise the promise of Brown v. Board of Education in their own city. Lukas masterfully teases out the social geography of the place. Lukas has tremendous empathy for where his Charlestown townies who resist the end of de facto segregation in Boston schools come from, ideologically as well as economically. This quality puts one in mind of works like J D Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis and Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right . Lukas is a civil rights warrior: he takes up the fight where Martin Luther King was bringing it at the end of his life to cities of the North, the places we classically associate with racial injury and segregation, and to places with an insidious apartness rooted in the cradle of liberty. The irony is that the anti-immigrationist family he follows lives on Monument Avenue in Charlestown, literally in the shadow of the Bunker Hill monument. That tension—between the land of liberty that wants to allow for opportunity but not create the conditions of equality—is one that resonates all the way back to Winthrop’s time through the moment where Lukas’s story really picks up, which is in the 1930s or 1940s, all the way forward to today. He traces families from their Massachusetts and immigrant origins, so you get a long sweep of history in it, too. It depends on where and how you look. One of the wonderful things about the kaleidoscopic quality of Lukas, where he’s consistently moving the camera around, is we see the ways that race has been inscribed into the urban fabric of the city are firm and quite resistant. Boston is not known, even today, as a friendly place for people of colour. But there is not a Boston equivalent of the scale, violence and deprivation of Chicago’s south side, say. It’s not necessarily that Boston is a more porous place. It’s that during the Great Migration—the mid-century movement north of Southern African-Americans free-people and their descendants—Boston was a secondary destination compared to New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. The Great Migration re-made those cities, creating large urban ghettos, but also thriving black middle-class suburbs. Boston’s Great Migration history is different. Lukas traces some of it: there is an influx from the South, where the new black population from the South mixes somewhat uneasily not only with the white population in the city, but also with the ancient black population in the city. But it doesn’t remake the city in the way that it does with those other places. Yup. There are many varieties of what used to be called ‘white ethnic’ both power and poverty here. That’s one of the things that really comes out in Lukas: the ways that Irish immigrants, for example, engrossed an enormous amount of political and patronage power at the same time that places like Southie and Eastie were white ghettos of a sort. There is a native-born white underclass here. I’m not a twentieth-century urbanist, so I’m not an authority to quote on this."

"The other thing that is distinctive about Boston, which brings us to Lahiri is that Boston was—and is again lately—a tremendously international city. But that wasn’t true for much of the twentieth century. It’s remade by its English immigrants in the seventeenth century, to a certain degree by Scots, Irish, Germans, French, as well as Africans in the eighteenth century, and fundamentally by the Irish influx in the nineteenth century. But it doesn’t become a place of wildly disparate tongues and languages until much more recently. That late twenty-first century city of many immigrant populations is one that Lahiri and other novelists, such as Zadie Smith in White Teeth , get us into. We are the largest college town the world has ever known. There’s something around the order of 300,000 students and a score of institutions, which have grown hugely in power-scale and complexity since the founding of Harvard in the 1630s. Higher Ed, and its derivative sectors in tech and biotech, are the largest employers in the metropolitan area. That fact is remaking everything from culture and economics to our spiralling housing costs in the twenty-first century. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Lahiri’s communities of Bengalis are exemplary of a new porousness that’s not always peaceful. It’s a global city in ways that it was when Winthrop was keeping his journal, and in ways that Horton attested to. Lahiri’s characters are often knowledge workers, of one kind or another, whose worlds are diasporic. I think she has a great knack for showing both the closeness and the distance of peoples and cities. They seem so close together at the same time, they’re incredibly far apart. Many of her characters experience Boston as their embarkation port in the New World, as a place of opportunity but also of mortification. She uses that word ‘mortify’ quite a lot as a way to describe how people treat their elders. For example, her stories are a place where women often don’t have the opportunities or the security that they have in the world that they were leaving. As in Lukas, the revolutionary heritage hovers, sometimes in interesting, flickering ways. In the terrific story, “When Mr. Prizada Came to Dine,” where Bengali émigrés are watching what turns out to be the birth of Bangladesh on TV in their college town, the narrator tells us she hasn’t learned the history of Partition, which is of her ancestral history, because in her Massachusetts school they’re drilling the history of the thirteen colonies—Boston history."

"There are two great books about the assembling of the physical city. Mapping Boston is the one that is still widely in print. It’s a group of essays and catalogue entries edited by an urban planner from the Harvard School of Design and an eminent map curator. It’s a place where you see the earth on which all of the social dynamics that we’ve discussed grow. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter A city that starts as a tiny peninsula connected by a little neck of land to the mainland is transformed, in Dutch fashion, with infill over the course of the first half and into the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Many of the things that were floating in the harbour in Winthrop’s day are now under the city streets. You can see, in the maps that are so beautifully reproduced in the book, the coming together of the various neighbourhoods that Horton and Lukas take us into. You can see the cutting down of the hills. Winthrop’s ‘City on a Hill’ was a city on three hills in the West of Boston (the most famous of which is Beacon Hill). These hills loamed mountainously over the city in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, but in the beginning of the nineteenth century they were carted away, wheelbarrow by wheelbarrow, to make the neighbourhood known as Back Bay. “Boston has a more interesting, ground-up built environment than most American cities.” Boston is a physical incarnation of the preposterous ambition that we talked about at the beginning of the hour: the shape of the city isn’t suited our residential needs or our commerce, so let’s just remake it as a regular-sized land. You can see the organic city; that is, where the paths are marked out by the traffic of horses and feet, to the gridded city that is making way for streetcars, then subways and then cars. Boston has a more interesting, ground-up built environment than most American cities. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, many American cities are planned; Boston is really made ."