South Boston My Home Town

An engaging yet objective look at the 350-year old history of "Southie," a neighborhood that has survived largely unchanged since the early days of immigrant Irish families and old-time political bosses.

An engaging yet objective look at the 350-year old history of "Southie," a neighborhood that has survived largely unchanged since the early days of immigrant Irish families and old-time political bosses. Originally published by Quinlan Press in 1988 and reprinted by Northeastern University Press in 1994. With a new foreword by Lawrence W. Kennedy.

This collection is both a tribute to the distinguished work of Thomas H. O'Connor, the dean of Boston historians, and a survey of the best and innovative contemporary work on Boston's diverse histories.

A history of and collectors' guide to nineteenth-century glass manufacturing in South Boston

During the early part of the 20th century, technological advances in the printing industry spawned a new fad: postcard collecting. Publishers dispatched photographers to communities throughout the country and produced iconic images that formed a portrait of the nation. Travelers used postcards to communicate with friends and family and to maintain a visual record of their itineraries. Although the fad was short lived, thousands of postcards and, in some cases, entire collections survive to this day. Through vintage postcards, South Boston shows one of Bostons most beautiful neighborhoods with miles of sandy beaches, shaded thoroughfares, and well-kept brick and wood frame homes. South Boston is an Irish American enclave that has probably undergone fewer physical and social changes than any other section of the city.

From the almshouses of seventeenth-century Puritans to the massive housing projects of the mid-twentieth century, the struggle over housing assistance in the United States has exposed a deep-seated ambivalence about the place of the urban poor. Lawrence J. Vale's groundbreaking book is both a comprehensive institutional history of public housing in Boston and a broader examination of the nature and extent of public obligation to house socially and economically marginal Americans during the past 350 years. First, Vale highlights startling continuities both in the way housing assistance has been delivered to the American poor and in the policies used to reward the nonpoor. He traces the stormy history of the Boston Housing Authority, a saga of entrenched patronage and virulent racism tempered, and partially overcome, by the efforts of unyielding reformers. He explores the birth of public housing as a program intended to reward the upwardly mobile working poor, details its painful transformation into a system designed to cope with society's least advantaged, and questions current policy efforts aimed at returning to a system of rewards for responsible members of the working class. The troubled story of Boston public housing exposes the mixed motives and ideological complexity that have long characterized housing in America, from the Puritans to the projects.

The first biography of the popular, long-serving congressman from South Boston