A City So Grand: The Rise of an American Metropolis: Boston 1850-1900

A well-researched book that just kind of plodded along. It could have been a lot more exciting. I did learn new things about my former city though, especially the part about the Underground Railroad.

Book #2 on Boston. <br /><br />Is there any city as high on its own farts as the city of Boston?<br /><br />NO<br /><br />That being said, the history of the 19th century in Boston is fascinating and does a great job covering the last time period when Boston was truly grandly relevant on a national scale. The sections on the abolitionists and expansion of the Back Bay are well done. Paired nicely with American Radicals (by a professor from U Mass Boston).

Stephen Puleo has again created an unforgettable story of Boston this time from 1850 - 1900. I found that he was able to capture the feel of those decades by focusing on several major developments with just enough detail to express the marvel of the undertaking without so much specificity that the power was diminished. Some of the topics that he included are the abolitionist movement, building of the railroads, filling of Back Bay, immigration,<br />MA troops that fought in the Civil War, the fire that burned most of downtown, and the many firsts all of which coalesced into the building of an<br />amazing city by audacious, fearless individuals.

Good overview of Boston's emergence as a world class city in the latter half of the 19th century. Includes the abolitionist movement, the huge public works projects of filling in the Back Bay and building the first subway system in the US, the impacts of immigration and annexation, the rise of the academic and medical and research communities. It was an age marked by optimism, daring, boldness and innovation. The writing is a little clunky in places but overall its an engaging and readable book.

Boston really has made a contribution to American history and culture. Stephen Puleo's book is immensely readable and appreciates the sweep of history during those 50 years where transportation, emancipation, technology, immigration trials and tribulations and learning were reaching their zenith. It was not a smooth road but the town became a beacon after all. Mind you, there still is that race thing that plagues us, but that's true for the whole of the American Experience.

3.5 stars. This is an interesting read for anyone who is interested in the rather niche microhistory of what was going on with the city of Boston from 1850-1900 (which was a lot, from the first subway system in the US to the first x-rays in the US). But it's not super grabby unless you really like Boston history and trivia.

A great education about the amazing city of Boston. The Author turned a history lesson into an incredible book. Highly recommend it.

Family book group book, May 2021<br /><br />I didn’t finish it completely but it was very interesting and showed the beginnings of so much of Boston that we still still love today.

This was very slow for me and hard to get into. Author's writing style isn't for me!

Having lived in and around Boston for nearly all of my life, it was exciting to read a book that dealt with so many familiar topics that I had heard about in history classes growing up as a kid in New England. What made the book real for me, however, and more than just a textbook, were the smaller stories that eventually led to larger, more historical moments, but that are not so widely known in and of themselves. <br /><br />For instance, the story of Anthony Burns, an escaped slave, who was forcibly returned to the South in accordance with the Fugitive Slave Act after having escaped to Boston for freedom and for paid work. He was delivered back to the South by the government of Massachusetts with armed Marines despite the groundswell of abolitionist protest, which for the first time, became an actual physical force, and not just an intellectual parlor game. It seemed to me to be one of those moments, like Harper's Ferry, that takes an intellectual ideal and turns it into real life protest and dissent against a law that increasingly seemed to be anathema to everything the Constitution was created to promote.<br /><br />It was also fascinating to see the tug of war between the Protestant elite and the increasing population of Catholic immigrants. The Protestants, who brought so much prestige, intellectual acumen, religious progressive thought, technological insight and future planning to the creation of the city, in comparison to the much different contribution made by the early waves of Irish and Italian immigrants. <br /><br />These were the same immigrants who flooded the city just before the Civil War, bringing with them an Old World Catholicism, a rather bawdy and boisterous way of life in comparison the Protestant elite, and who, after originally challenging the city with rampant disease and escalating unemployment, eventually built the most innovative American city of the time with little more than backbone--literally, in the form of cheap labor to undertake railroads, subway systems, the filling in and building up of the Back Bay, the rebuilding of the city after the Boston Fire, and ultimately the realization of the American Dream, by becoming influential politicians who would take over the city, policemen, firemen and selectmen, to realize a dream which needs to be reborn and reinvented with every new wave of immigration: in the face of discrimination, degradation, and open hostility from the very country they are trying to be a part of.<br /><br />Ultimately, it was the contradictions in the history of Boston that came across as the most interesting part of this book. An otherwise severely regional city with an occasionally surprising international reach; a city that expands and contracts due to it's ingenuity or limitations, it's lack of population or it's swelling immigration floods. A deeply 'conservative' town, the town of the Puritans, but also of religious progressive thought, as in the Unitarian Universalists and Christian Abolitionists. A town of fervent abolitionist rage, and one in which race relations have always been one busing law away from riots. The Catholic immigrants, who were so in need of the educational institutions set up by Protestants, and the Protestant academics of those very institutions, who needed the sweat and toil of everyday men and women, to realize their ideas which would otherwise remain so without them. <br /><br /><br />