Eden on the Charles: The Making of Boston

Eden on the Charles: The Making of Boston
Michael Rawson (Author)

Hardcover: 384 pages
Publisher: Harvard University Press (October 1, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0674048415
ISBN-13: 978-0674048416

Drinking a glass of tap water, strolling in a park, hopping a train for the suburbs: some aspects of city life are so familiar that we donΓΓé¼Γäót think twice about them. But such simple actions are structured by complex relationships with our natural world. The contours of these relationshipsΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥social, cultural, political, economic, and legalΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥were established during AmericaΓΓé¼Γäós first great period of urbanization in the nineteenth century, and Boston, one of the earliest cities in America, often led the nation in designing them. A richly textured cultural and social history of the development of nineteenth-century Boston, this book provides a new environmental perspective on the creation of AmericaΓΓé¼Γäós first cities.

Eden on the Charles explores how Bostonians channeled country lakes through miles of pipeline to provide clean water; dredged the ocean to deepen the harbor; filled tidal flats and covered the peninsula with houses, shops, and factories; and created a metropolitan system of parks and greenways, facilitating the conversion of fields into suburbs. The book shows how, in Boston, different class and ethnic groups brought rival ideas of nature and competing visions of a ΓΓé¼┼ôcity upon a hillΓΓé¼┬¥ to the process of urbanizationΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥and were forced to conform their goals to the realities of BostonΓΓé¼Γäós distinctive natural setting. The outcomes of their battles for control over the cityΓΓé¼Γäós development were ultimately recorded in the very fabric of Boston itself. In BostonΓΓé¼Γäós history, we find the seeds of the environmental relationships thatΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥for better or worseΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥have defined urban America to this day.