For Hundreds of Thousands of immigrants, coming to Massachusetts has meant exchanging one community for another in multiple ways that are often overlooked. Whether home was originally an Irish tenant farm or the slave quarters of a Southern plantation or an Eastern European ghetto, whether its mention evoked warm memories or nightmares, immigration has required adopting a new identity consonant with new circumstances. Men who considered themselves Milanese moved to Boston's North End and became Italian Americans; women who identified themselves with County Cork turned into Irish Americans when Worcester became their hometown. The identities that immigrants adopted demarcated the outlines of their new communities. This collection of essays explores some of the communities that Massachusetts immigrants created for themselves in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Contributions investigate how individual immigrant settlements came about and how groups interacted with one another as well as how newcomers were received. The essays also assess how immigration affected those who experienced it, the men and women who gave up the rhythms of their birthplaces in favor of the pulsing beat of their adopted homeland. Because the Bay State was a primary destination for immigrants during the social reorganization caused by industrial and urban development, the volume offers important case studies, with national significance, of how newcomers and natives adjusted to each other and reshaped the boundaries of American communities. The collection explores the common aspects of community creation and development that linked their various ethnic experiences--Irish, French Canadian, Jewish, Italian,Swedish, and African American. Essayists are: Janette Thomas Greenwood, John F. McClymer, Reed Ueda, Jonathan M. Chu, Paula M. Kane, Kristen Petersen Farmelant, James J. Connolly, and Mark Herlihy. Published by the Massachusetts Historical Society

For Hundreds of Thousands of immigrants, coming to Massachusetts has meant exchanging one community for another in multiple ways that are often overlooked. Whether home was originally an Irish tenant farm or the slave quarters of a Southern plantation or an Eastern European ghetto, whether its mention evoked warm memories or nightmares, immigration has required adopting a new identity consonant with new circumstances. Men who considered themselves Milanese moved to Boston's North End and became Italian Americans; women who identified themselves with County Cork turned into Irish Americans when Worcester became their hometown. The identities that immigrants adopted demarcated the outlines of their new communities. This collection of essays explores some of the communities that Massachusetts immigrants created for themselves in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Contributions investigate how individual immigrant settlements came about and how groups interacted with one another as well as how newcomers were received. The essays also assess how immigration affected those who experienced it, the men and women who gave up the rhythms of their birthplaces in favor of the pulsing beat of their adopted homeland. Because the Bay State was a primary destination for immigrants during the social reorganization caused by industrial and urban development, the volume offers important case studies, with national significance, of how newcomers and natives adjusted to each other and reshaped the boundaries of American communities. The collection explores the common aspects of community creation and development that linked their various ethnic experiences--Irish, French Canadian, Jewish, Italian,Swedish, and African American. Essayists are: Janette Thomas Greenwood, John F. McClymer, Reed Ueda, Jonathan M. Chu, Paula M. Kane, Kristen Petersen Farmelant, James J. Connolly, and Mark Herlihy. Published by the Massachusetts Historical Society

Historians commonly point to the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act as the inception of a new chapter in the story of American immigration. This wide-ranging interdisciplinary volume brings together scholars from varied disciplines to consider what is genuinely new about this period.

Historians commonly point to the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act as the inception of a new chapter in the story of American immigration. This wide-ranging interdisciplinary volume brings together scholars from varied disciplines to consider what is genuinely new about this period.

Comprising twenty essays by leading scholars, this insightful collection provides the best recent writing on the Transcendentalists, the New England religious reformers and intellectuals who challenged both spiritual and secular orthodoxies between the 1830s and the 1850s. The volume addresses Transcendentalism from many directions, illuminating the movement more clearly than ever before. The contributions consider aspects of the relationship between the Transcendentalists and their intellectual and social world, assess the movement's cultural legacy, and place Transcendentalism in the context of historical and literary scholarship, past and present.

This collection of essays studies aspects of the role of a single state in the transformation of American life following the Revolutionary War. Drawn from a conference on the topic held at the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1990, the contributions address religious, economic, and social as well as governmental facets of the process. At the close of the American Revolution, Massachusetts learned that independence invalidated many customary assumptions and practices. As the citizens of the state worked to establish their new Commonwealth and determine its relationship to a federal government also in its infancy, they were forced to confront challenging problems both within Massachusetts and outside it. Religious differences fractured the Standing Order, separating Unitarians and Congregationalists from each other at the same time that pressures from Episcopalians, Baptists, and others urged an end to the religious establishment. Poverty posed problems for Massachusetts at large, and particularly for Boston, at the same time that public officeholders struggled to create new governmental institutions both for the Commonwealth and for its capital. Massachusetts merchants had to develop new, independent patterns of trade in response to American withdrawal from the British Empire. Diplomats had to find a place for the Commonwealth in the world order. And federal officeholders from Massachusetts needed to address the most divisive of domestic issues, slavery. The essays in this collection reveal how Massachusetts coped with these unexpected problems of independence.

All states are not created equal, at least not when it comes to their influence on American history. That assumption underlies Massachusetts and the Civil War. The volume's ten essays coalesce around the national significance of Massachusetts through the Civil War era, the ways in which the commonwealth reflected and even modelled the Union's precarious but real wartime unification, and the Bay State's postwar return to the schisms that predated the war. Rather than attempting to summarize every aspect of the state's contribution to the wartime Union, the collection focuses on what was distinctive about its influence during the great crisis of national unity. In the first section, "The Opposition to Slavery," essays by John Stauffer, Dean Grodzins, Peter Wirzbicki, and Richard S. Newman demonstrate the central role Massachusetts played in the rise of both the antislavery movement and abolitionism. They show how slavery's foes united, planned, and understood their cause, and how they envisioned a postwar nation free of servitude. In the second section, "The War Years," Matthew Mason, Carol Bundy, and Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray investigate how the exigencies of war unified the commonwealth across party lines and over the distance between home and the front. In the final section, "Reconciliation" Sarah J. Purcell, Amy Morsman, and Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai probe postwar efforts to recover from the war's profound disruptions.

These essays mark the maturation of scholarship on Margaret Fuller (1810-1850), one of the most important public intellectuals of the nineteenth century and a writer whose works have been much revived in recent decades. The authors--leading scholars of Fuller, Transcendentalism, and the antebellum period--consider anew Fuller the critic, the journalist, the reformer, the traveler, and the social and cultural observer, and make fresh contributions to the study of her life and work. Drawing on developments in gender theory, transatlantic studies, and archival excavations of the networks of reform, this volume defines Fuller as a significant intellectual precursor, a critic who analyzed and challenged the dominant interpretive paradigms of her own time and who remains strikingly relevant for ours.

All states are not created equal, at least not when it comes to their influence on American history. That assumption underlies Massachusetts and the Civil War. The volume's ten essays coalesce around the national significance of Massachusetts through the Civil War era, the ways in which the commonwealth reflected and even modelled the Union's precarious but real wartime unification, and the Bay State's postwar return to the schisms that predated the war. Rather than attempting to summarize every aspect of the state's contribution to the wartime Union, the collection focuses on what was distinctive about its influence during the great crisis of national unity. In the first section, "The Opposition to Slavery," essays by John Stauffer, Dean Grodzins, Peter Wirzbicki, and Richard S. Newman demonstrate the central role Massachusetts played in the rise of both the antislavery movement and abolitionism. They show how slavery's foes united, planned, and understood their cause, and how they envisioned a postwar nation free of servitude. In the second section, "The War Years," Matthew Mason, Carol Bundy, and Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray investigate how the exigencies of war unified the commonwealth across party lines and over the distance between home and the front. In the final section, "Reconciliation" Sarah J. Purcell, Amy Morsman, and Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai probe postwar efforts to recover from the war's profound disruptions.