Introduction: Boston, Massachusetts and the World, A Chronology

The idea to pull together a chronology of the major historical "stepping stones" of global, social and labor significance, in Massachusetts' history, was rooted in an early BSF Planning Committee conversation about a year ago. There is a long string of Boston and Massachusetts historical events that went on to have important social, political, economic and labor impacts.

Like the expanding ripples of the proverbial pebble thrown into a pond, these events went well beyond the boundaries of the state, to gradually invest the entire world. As is the case with most Americans, most progressives either never studied or have readily forgotten this history.

However, in order to know where we are going we need to keep a clear memory of where we have been. In order to know who we are, we need to remember our intellectual and political ancestors.

Boston is where the American Revolution, the Industrial Revolution and the Anti-Slavery Movement started, as well as where local activists historically played pivotal roles in many of the emancipatory mass movements that made American history.

Great humanists, thinkers and social activists, most of them immigrants and children of immigrants, lived in Boston and Massachusetts on and off throughout its history. From contemporary activists/intellectuals like Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky to Black Liberation leaders like Malcom X and Martin Luther King, from counter culture pathfinders like Jack Kerouac, Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, to Anarchists Emma Goldman and Arturo Giovannitti, writers and poets like Louisa May Alcott and Emily Dickinson, to the transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller and Ralf Waldo Emerson, they all lived, studied, worked in Boston and/or in Massachusetts at one time or another.

In order to share some of this history with BSF participants, we asked University of Massachusetts professor, labor historian and good friend, James Green to draw up a chronology for us to show when and how this social history was made.

Social history, much like a great river of water, is real and it flows, evolving through space and time. The actions and experiences of those who before us tried to steward a human development in balance with the social and natural environments are an integral part of that river. As we attempt to create viable alternatives to Capitalism, a system based on ruthless exploitation of social and natural resources, we come to embrace the lessons learned by those who tried before us.

This chronology helps orienting ourselves in the direction of this key but not immediately apparent psychological aspect. It strengthens ever so revealingly our connection to the place where we have chosen to live and work. In so doing it confers upon us a new and unmistakable identity, one that clearly transcends integration with religion, nationality, race and sex as bases for political and economic action.

With this chronology, visitors may discover the rich historical stream of social movements and struggles for human liberation that, together with the thinkers, activists and utopians mentioned, inspired the Boston Social Forum and from which many participants no doubt claim their descent.

-- Pasqualino Colombaro

Pasqualino Colombaro is Field Representative of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Local 509, (Boston). He is also Chair of the New Priorities Committee of the Mass. Jobs with Justice, President of the Italian American Labor Council in Boston, Liaison for the Center for International Social Studies in Rome and a long time social/political activist in New England.