Read Jim Green's illuminating chronology of movements in the Boston region. Pasqualino Colombaro (SEIU 509), welcomes the piece, writing that "like the expanding ripples of the proverbial pebble thrown into a pond, the events [described] went well beyond the boundaries of the state, to gradually invest the entire world."

Boston, Massachusetts and the World

By James Green


In the years when Boston produced leading writers, poets, artists, philosophers, radicals and reformers-the era that spanned time from the War of Independence to the Civil War-the city was called "the Athens of America," because it appeared to be a glittering center of democratic culture. The writer and jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes even dubbed the Boston, "Hub of the solar system," referring half in jest to that golden era when the city's commercial and social energies attracted attention throughout the Atlantic world.


There are few people today, except perhaps some professors at Harvard University, who think of Boston as hub of the universe. But in a specific historical sense, the city has been more connected than most North American cities to world events and it has generated more than its share of innovations in the realms of capitalist economics and humanist politics.


Boston is a not "world-class city" like New York, not an international city like Washington, not an industrial city like Chicago or a cosmopolitan city like Toronto or Montreal, San Francisco or Los Angeles, but Boston is perhaps the nation's premier political city, having been home to many generations of religious dissenters and rabble-rousers, revolutionaries and reformers, social critics and political pundits, campaign managers and cabinet secretaries, not to mention three, and possibly four, presidents of the United States.


On the eve of the Boston Social Forum, a gathering that will attract socially-concerned people from all over the world to the University of Massachusetts Boston, it might be of interest to those who will come here to learn about moments in our past when people made history in this city and gave birth to historic movements for social, political and economic change.


Go to the full chronology...


James Green is Professor of History at the
College of Public and Community Service,
University of Massachusetts Boston
(james.green@umb.edu) and President of the
Labor and Working Class History Association
(lawcha.org)