Additional Resources
What is a "casual historian"? Well, I've never formally studied the subject and the idea of chasing down and reading the personal correspondence of historical figures from 250 years ago terrifies me, but I love a good history book. My tours have grown as I've read secondary and tertiary sources, taken other tours, and combed through local museums. I feel very strongly that history should belong to all of us, and we can each do more to understand the history of the land we occupy. Below is a list of the top books I've read that have informed my tours. If you're interested in learning this history for yourself, I think this list will provide you with many satisfied, informative hours. Enjoy! (Book descriptions shamefully copy/pasted from Amazon)
1776
David McCullough
In this masterful book, David McCullough tells the intensely human story of those who marched with General George Washington in the year of the Declaration of Independence—when the whole American cause was riding on their success, without which all hope for independence would have been dashed and the noble ideals of the Declaration would have amounted to little more than words on paper.
As If an Enemy’s Country: The British Occupation of Boston and the Origins of Revolution
In the dramatic period leading to the American Revolution, no event did more to foment patriotic sentiment among colonists than the armed occupation of Boston by British soldiers. As If an Enemy's Country is Richard Archer's gripping narrative of those critical months between October 1, 1768 and the winter of 1770 when Boston was an occupied town.
Richard Archer
The Boston Massacre: A Family History
Serena Zabin
The story of the Boston Massacre—when on a late winter evening in 1770, British soldiers shot five local men to death—is familiar to generations. But from the very beginning, many accounts have obscured a fascinating truth: the Massacre arose from conflicts that were as personal as they were political.
Boston Women’s Heritage Trail: Seven Self-Guided Walks Through Four Centuries of Boston Women’s History
Women have played active, prominent roles in Boston history since the days of Anne Hutchinson - the colonial freethinker who bravely challenged the authority of ruling Puritan ministers in 1638. Hutchinson's action is only one of more than 200 stories of Boston women told in the newly expanded guidebook from the Boston Women's Heritage Trail.
Polly Welts Kaufman, Jean Gibran, Sylvia McDowell, and Mary Howland Smoyer
Bunker Hill: A City, A Siege, A Revolution
Nathaniel Philbrick
In the opening volume of his acclaimed American Revolution series, Nathaniel Philbrick turns his keen eye to pre-Revolutionary Boston and the spark that ignited the American Revolution. In the aftermath of the Boston Tea Party and the violence at Lexington and Concord, the conflict escalated and skirmishes gave way to outright war in the Battle of Bunker Hill.
The City-State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power, 1630-1865
In the vaunted annals of America’s founding, Boston has long been held up as an exemplary “city upon a hill” and the “cradle of liberty” for an independent United States. Wresting this iconic urban center from these misleading, tired clichés, The City-State of Boston highlights Boston’s overlooked past as an autonomous city-state, and in doing so, offers a pathbreaking and brilliant new history of early America.
Mark Peterson
Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, and the American Book Award, the bestselling Common Ground is much more than the story of the busing crisis in Boston as told through the experiences of three families. As Studs Terkel remarked, it's "gripping, indelible...a truth about all large American cities."
J. Anthony Lukas
Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919
A new 100th anniversary edition of the only adult book on one of the odder disasters in US history—and the greed, disregard for poor immigrants, and lack of safety standards that led to it.
Stephen Puleo
Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party & The Making of America
This thrilling book tells the full story of the an iconic episode in American history, the Boston Tea Party—exploding myths, exploring the unique city life of eighteenth-century Boston, and setting this audacious prelude to the American Revolution in a global context for the first time.
Benjamin Carp
John Adams
David McCullough
This is history on a grand scale—a book about politics and war and social issues, but also about human nature, love, religious faith, virtue, ambition, friendship, and betrayal, and the far-reaching consequences of noble ideas. Above all, John Adams is an enthralling, often surprising story of one of the most important and fascinating Americans who ever lived.
Lost on the Freedom Trail: The National Park Service and Urban Renewal in Postwar Boston
Seth C. Bruggeman
Boston National Historical Park is one of America's most popular heritage destinations, drawing in millions of visitors annually. Tourists flock there to see the site of the Boston Massacre, to relive Paul Revere's midnight ride, and to board Old Ironsides—all of these bound together by the iconic Freedom Trail, which traces the city's revolutionary saga. Making sense of the Revolution, however, was never the primary aim for the planners who reimagined Boston's heritage landscape after the Second World War. Seth C. Bruggeman demonstrates that the Freedom Trail was always largely a tourist gimmick, devised to lure affluent white Americans into downtown revival schemes, its success hinging on a narrow vision of the city's history run through with old stories about heroic white men. When Congress pressured the National Park Service to create this historical park for the nation's bicentennial celebration in 1976, these ideas seeped into its organizational logic, precluding the possibility that history might prevail over gentrification and profit.
Lucy Stone: An Unapologetic Life
Sally G. McMillen
A pivotal leader in the fight for both abolition and gender equality, Lucy Stone's achievements marked the beginning of the women's rights movement and helped to lay the groundwork for the eventual winning of women's suffrage. Yet, today most Americans have never heard of Lucy Stone. Sally McMillen sets out to address this significant historical oversight in this engaging biography. Exploring her extraordinary life and the role she played in crafting a more just society, McMillen restores Lucy Stone to her rightful place at the center of the nineteenth-century women's rights movement.
Paul Revere’s Ride
David Hackett Fischer
Paul Revere's midnight ride looms as an almost mythical event in American history - yet it has been largely ignored by scholars and left to patriotic writers and debunkers. In Paul Revere's Ride, David Hackett Fischer fashions an exciting narrative that offers deep insight into the outbreak of revolution and the emergence of the American republic.
A People’s History of the New Boston
Jim Vrabel
Using interviews with many activists, contemporary news accounts, and historical sources, Jim Vrabel describes the demonstrations, sit-ins, picket lines, boycotts, and contentious negotiations through which residents exerted their influence on the city that was being rebuilt around them. He includes case histories of the fights against urban renewal, highway construction, and airport expansion; for civil rights, school desegregation, and welfare reform; and over Vietnam and busing.
The Rascal King: The Life And Times Of James Michael Curley (1874-1958)
Nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography, Beatty's spellbinding story of "the Kingfish of Massachusetts" is also an epic of his city, its immigrant people, and its turbulent times. It is simply biography at its best.
Jack Beatty
The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams
A revelatory biography from a Pulitzer Prize-winner about the most essential Founding Father—the one who stood behind the change in thinking that produced the American Revolution.
Stacy Schiff
Secret Boston
Kim Foley Mackinnon
Think you know everything about the quirky side of Boston’s history and landmarks? Kim Foley MacKinnon’s newest book, 'Secret Boston: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful, and Obscure,' will make you think again.
Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the US Navy
From the decision to build six heavy frigates, through the cliff-hanger campaign against Tripoli, to the war that shook the world in 1812, Ian W. Toll tells this grand tale with the political insight of Founding Brothers and the narrative flair of Patrick O'Brian
Ian Toll
The Trials of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson’s Boston
Albert J. Von Frank
Before 1854, most Northerners managed to ignore the distant unpleasantness of slavery. But that year an escaped Virginia slave, Anthony Burns, was captured and brought to trial in Boston--and never again could Northerners look the other way. This is the story of Burns's trial and of how, arising in abolitionist Boston just as the incendiary Kansas-Nebraska Act took effect, it revolutionized the moral and political climate in Massachusetts and sent shock waves through the nation.
The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: America’s First Black Poet and Her Encounters with the Founding Fathers
In The Trials of Phillis Wheatley, Henry Louis Gates Jr. explores the pivotal role that Wheatley played in shaping the black literary tradition. Writing with all the lyricism and critical skill that place him at the forefront of American letters, Gates brings to life the characters, debates, and controversy that surrounded Wheatley in her day and ours.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.