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By Steve Puleo
Welcome to Food for Thought. This column features a collection
of short nuggets that range from news and information
about my books to answers to questions I’ve received
from readers. If you have any suggestions about further Food
for Thought items, please e-mail me and include “Food
for Thought” in your subject line.
My fourth book, A City So Grand: The Rise of an American Metropolis, Boston 1850-1900, is now available. I’m very excited about this book, which is written in the narrative nonfiction style so many of you have told me you enjoy as a way of learning about history. I wanted to offer a few thoughts
on the remarkable second half of the nineteenth century, when Boston transformed itself from a large town to a world-class city. As always, I welcome your responses.
Authors are often asked what theme they are trying to convey in books, or what between-the-lines message they are attempting to get across. In A City So Grand my intent was to chronicle the sweeping changes Boston underwent during the second half of the nineteenth century. But as I dug through the rich sources and learned more about this period, I was fascinated: I realized what a passive word “underwent” is and how amazingly active and influential Boston and her people were during these 50 years. Boston did not merely allow changes to happen – she led, drove, and powered these changes with an unrelenting will and desire to succeed.
In my author’s note, I point out that Boston itself is the enduring “character” in A City So Grand, and that like any great leader, she was “challenged and conflicted, brazen and resilient, humble and triumphant; on some occasions tripped up by hubris, but on most, rewarded for her vision, boldness, and perseverance.” Indeed, I refer to the period from 1850-1900 as Boston’s most “fruitful, illustrious, and influential fifty years.” By 1900, after a whirlwind and tempestuous fifty years, a pulsating, vital, prideful, and irrepressible Boston – once known as “Boston Town” – stood as one of the world’s great cities.
Thus, it became clear to me as I organized the research that the “theme” of this book would be a city’s ability to tackle the overwhelming, overcome the onerous, and achieve greatness, sometimes against all odds. Boston demonstrates this in so many ways throughout the second half of the nineteenth century – with the ferocity of its abolitionist movement; the audacity of the great Back Bay landfill project; the boldness of its physical expansion to accommodate a population explosion fueled by immigrants; the unquenchable determination of its citizenry to rebuild in the wake of the devastating fire of 1872; and the glorious and triumphant opening of America’s first subway.
If readers sense a contrast with today, it’s no wonder. As I learned of the creativity and commitment Bostonians employed to transform their city between1850 and 1900, I experienced part frustration and part envy that we seem to have such difficulty coalescing to accomplish great things today. Why is this? Some people point to the excessive political partisanship that seems to consume every endeavor in the 21st century; yet, there are no political differences today that even approach the slavery debate that ripped the country apart during the 1850s. Are there other reasons? Has our litigious society made us reluctant to take such risks? Do excessive bureaucracy and regulation deter even the most determined? Has the speed of our technology and communications made us less patient to tackle lengthy projects (the Back Bay took nearly 34 years to complete)? Has this same technology isolated us so that we no longer seek community-wide solutions to common problems? Or has the pace of everyday life simply exhausted our reservoir of time and energy, and made accomplishing great things seem overly daunting?
I’m not sure of the answers, but I am sure that Boston and Bostonians possessed grand vision in the late 19th century. Thomas Wentworth Higginson envisioned a country without slavery and the advancement of blacks, and thus charged forward as one of Boston’s most militant abolitionists; during the Civil War, he commanded the first Union regiment of black troops. Alexander Graham Bell saw Boston and its intellectual and scientific environment as the perfect crucible to test his theories about transmitting the human voice over wires. Henry Whitney’s entrepreneurial spirit drove him to take a chance on fledgling technology in 1888, which led to the demise of horse-drawn trolley cars and the electrification of Boston’s entire trolley system within a few short years. Walter Dodd risked grave peril to his own health to achieve breakthrough results with X-rays at Massachusetts General Hospital. Each of these men believed in meeting enormous challenges head-on and each chose Boston as his testing ground.
It was their willingness to dream big dreams, and then transform those dreams into concrete realities, that also transformed the Boston Town of fifty years earlier into a powerful metropolis by the dawn of the twentieth century. By 1900, Boston was a city that led the world, a city for the ages.
I wonder. In so many endeavors – science, transportation, city planning, engineering, politics, industry, and other great causes – don’t we yearn for such dreamers today?
The 90th anniversary of the Boston molasses flood (January 15, 2009) generated a huge resurgence in Dark Tide. The book has always done well, but the first half of 2009 was especially rich in interest. I began the year with a huge crowd at the Boston Public Library in January. In addition, three area communities — Beverly, Medford, Stoughton, MA — voted to read Dark Tide in town-wide reading programs. A fourth, Woburn, plans to read Dark Tide in the first half of 2010. This makes eight Massachusetts cities or towns that have chosen Dark Tide as their community-wide reading project.
The Boston Globe did a story on the book in several of its editions, as did several regional and local newspapers. Schools are getting on board in a much bigger way, too. Juniors at Dover-Sherborn, MA High School were assigned Dark Tide for their summer reading, and at Tri-County Regional Vocational School in Franklin, MA, all 900 students in Grades 9-12 were assigned the book. In addition, numerous book clubs continue to read Dark Tide and I spoke at several during the first half of 2009. To all of these dear readers, I offer my profound thanks.
As part of the Beverly and Stoughton townwide reading programs, I had the pleasure of conducting tours of the North End. My thanks to the more than 200 people who showed up for the Beverly tour (somehow we navigated the narrow streets of the North End successfully); and for the 100 Stoughton folks who joined me for the tour and, later, for an excellent Italian dinner. One of the great joys of being an author is meeting readers in these types of informal settings, and I thoroughly enjoyed the historic North End tours.
I've had the pleasure of speaking to several high school groups on a variety of topics. I recently gathered with about 50 or so juniors from Sharon, MA High School to discuss World War II, and afterward, with a smaller group to talk about the researching and writing process. I also spoke to the North Shore Young Writers Conference at the Waring School in Beverly, MA, where we had a lively discussion about the writing process and what it takes to become an author. I was immensely impressed with these young people — they were thoughtful, bright, and inquisitive; if these sessions were any indication, the writing of history and writing in general are in good hands for the future.
Many who have attended my presentations have suggested that I think about teaching. I’m happy to say that I’m doing more than thinking about it. This fall, I will teach a World War II course as an adjunct faculty member at Suffolk University in Boston. It’s an upper level history elective and I’m very excited about the opportunity. My thanks to Suffolk for the chance to share my knowledge of this topic with students.
I continue to be amazed at the number of e-mails and letters I receive from Italian-Americans across the country who have read The Boston Italians and shared their family stories with me. I am continuing to share them on the “Readers’ Stories” section of my website.
Many readers have asked whether Due to Enemy Action will be out in paperback. We continue to discuss this possibility with the hardcover publisher and we hope to have a resolution soon. Meanwhile, interest in the story continues: I was contacted by a documentary videographer who is continuing the search for the wreckage of the USS Eagle 56 off the coast of Maine. On a sad note, one of the Eagle 56 survivors and main characters in the book, Harold Petersen, passed away recently. Like so many WWII veterans, he is deeply missed.
I want to say a few words about my third book, The Boston Italians, which was published by Beacon Press in April 2007 (By the way, the book is subtitled: A Story of Pride, Perseverance and Paesani, from the Years of the Great Immigration to the Present Day. I love the subtitle and wish I had thought of it, but that credit goes to Amy Caldwell, my editor at Beacon.)
I am honored to have written the first full-length, 130-year history of the Italians in Boston. As the subtitle indicates, the book spans from about 1875, when Italians first arrived in Boston in any significant numbers, to today, when prominent Italian-Americans abound in the city and Italian-Americans can be proud of years of contributions to Boston, the surrounding Metropolitan area, and Massachusetts as a whole.
There's another reason The Boston Italians means so much to me: it is my story, too. Three of my four grandparents were immigrants, members of that first "Greatest Generation." Thus, I have woven the Puleo story through the course of The Boston Italians as illustrative of the overall fabric of the Boston Italian experience, a rich and colorful tapestry of enduring strength and value, one held together for one-hundred-and-thirty years by the legacies of struggle, perseverance, hard work, and the bond of family.
I’m very pleased that my second book, Due to Enemy Action, has been excerpted in an anthology entitled The Greatest Submarine Stories Ever Told, edited by Lamar Underwood. The book is subtitled, Dive! Dive! Fourteen Unforgettable Stories from the Deep.
Due to Enemy Action is in good company in this book, which includes excerpts from Shadow Divers (Robert Kurson), The Hunt for Red October (Tom Clancy), Torpedo Junction (Homer Hickham), 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Jules Verne), The Death of the USS Thresher (Norman Polmar), and The Terrible Hours (Peter Maas). It certainly is an honor to be associated with some of these authors and books.
I’m honored to see the Eagle 56 – U-853 story be recognized as one of the "greatest" submarine stories ever told, and hope all of you with an interest in submarines and the sea have a chance to pick up this book.
I’ve been blessed to have contact from readers from all over the country via e-mail, one of the truly great benefits of technology that too often seems overly intrusive. Please keep them coming; your comments, ideas, and questions are always interesting and “food for thought” in their own right.
I answer every e-mail I receive, though admittedly some responses
may take longer than others, and I appreciate the time and
interest you take in writing. You can contact me at
stephen@stephenpuleo.com.
My thanks to all of you for your kindness and support.
At virtually every Dark Tide presentation I give,
audience members seem genuinely interested in the source material
I used to research the book. If you’re reading this
column, I’ll assume you’re interested, too.
Dark Tide draws upon three major primary sources
(there are other primary sources and numerous secondary sources
as well) to form the heart of its narrative – two of
which, I’m proud to say, have never before (to my knowledge)
been used in any written account of the Great Boston Molasses
Flood.
I’ll start with the source that actually has been used
before: Judge Hugh Ogden’s summary report of the entire
lawsuit. This 50-plus page report offers rich background on
the disaster and tells us as much about Ogden as it does about
how he weighed the testimony and evidence. As I said in my
bibliographic essay to Dark Tide: “Ogden is
a careful writer, setting the scene remarkably well…and
tackling each of the major issues with literary verve and
methodical analysis.”
Dark Tide is the first published account to draw
on the other two sources: the 25,000-page transcript of the
huge three-year lawsuit that followed the flood; and the reports
that Hugh Ogden wrote to accompany his damage awards to flood
victims and their families. Both are riveting and compelling
sources, and together, they paint a broad and three-dimensional
portrait of the flood, the real-life characters in Dark
Tide, and the surrounding historical issues that “touch”
the flood story (anarchists, immigration, World War I and
munitions, etc.).
The damage award reports contain Ogden’s summary and
assessment of every individual’s suffering or financial
loss, and his rationale for awarding the amounts he did; the
latter, especially, provides a revealing look into the judge’s
character and thought process. The reports are also self-contained
short stories about every person injured or killed in the
flood: they let us know how much the person earned, how many
children he (in most cases) had, his occupation, the extent
of his injuries, etc. I “broke the seal” on these
damage awards — they had lain apparently untouched in
the archives for 80 years — my white gloves sooty with
fine, black dust.
The 25,000 pages of transcripts, contained in 40 bound volumes,
provide stunning firsthand accounts from eyewitnesses, victims,
family members of the deceased, and expert witnesses. It would
be difficult to imagine a richer trove of primary source material
than testimony from people who are under oath, during a period
before attorneys “coached” their witnesses. The
level of candor and forthrightness in the testimony is remarkable;
there are virtually no “I can’t recalls”
during the entire trial.
While the courtroom scenes appear only in Part 3 of Dark
Tide, I used these sources to form most of the book’s
narrative. For example, the Prologue, which describes Isaac
Gonzales’s late-night runs through Boston’s North
End, was drawn directly from Isaac’s somewhat bizarre
testimony.
You can learn more about how I made use of the sources in
Dark Tide’s Bibliographic Essay.
If you have any questions, ideas, or thoughts, please e-mail
me at
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