Synopses & Reviews
The history of Boston is inseparable from the life stories of its people--from the Puritans and Native Americans of the seventeenth century to the civic leaders and celebrities of today. In
Eminent Bostonians, Thomas H. O'Connor, the preeminent historian of Boston, offers a personal selection of entertaining and enlightening brief lives of notable residents of the city.
Eminent Bostonians includes some 130 figures of local and national significance from the arts, literature, religion, politics, science and medicine, business, education, and sports. Some would be on every list of prominent Bostonians, and some will come as a genuine surprise. As at a large dinner party, part of the fun is seeing who is seated next to whom: the fictional Proper Bostonian George Apley, a creation of John P. Marquand, followed by Anthony Athanas, the Albanian immigrant owner of Anthony's Pier 4 restaurant, followed by Crispus Attucks, a victim of the Boston Massacre in 1770. Or Lucy Stone, a pioneering feminist, next to Gilbert Stuart, the eighteenth-century portraitist, next to John L. Sullivan, the early-twentieth-century champion boxer. Or the Red Sox legend Ted Williams between Phillis Wheatley, an eighteenth-century African-American poet, and the Puritan founder John Winthrop.
And so it goes, from Abigail Adams to Leonard P. Zakim: a gallery of Brahmins and immigrants, workers and scholars, reformers and reactionaries, dreamers and schemers. Eminent Bostonians introduces longtime residents and newcomers alike to their neighbors--those who made Boston what it was and what it is today.
Review
Eminent Bostonians is a pleasurable book that has the same feel for the city and its characters that O'Connor showed in Boston A to Z. One may dip into the book at random and be drawn into the story of any number of distinctive figures from the seventeenth through twentieth centuries. The reader will find the mix satisfying and stimulating because O'Connor has transcended barriers of time, race, gender, ethnicity, and class to present a varied portrait of diverse elements of the city's past and present. This work is inclusive and thoughtful and bears the mark of fine judgment by one well qualified to tell Boston's story. Lawrence W. Kennedy, author of < i=""> Planning the City upon a Hill: Boston since 1630 <>
Review
Boston College historian O'Connor knows Boston better than probably anyone else alive today--he's written more than 10 books about it. This time, he gives us an encyclopedia of the men and women who have shaped the city. The usual suspects, such as Cotton Mather, Ted Williams, Julia Child, and Isabella Stewart Gardner, appear next to the more obscure--James Brendan Connolly, America's first Olympic gold medalist; suffragist Julia War Howe, who wrote the "Battle-Hymn of the Republic"; and civil rights activist Melnea Cass. Greg Lalas
Review
An eclectic collection...arranged alphabetically (from Abigail Adams to Leonard P. Zakim), it provides, as O'Connor puts it, "the pleasures of serendipitous association," with the poet John Boyle O'Reilly standing between Frederick Law Olmstead and Bobby Orr. And it's a collection with its author's heart on his sleeve. Boston Magazine
About the Author
Thomas H. O'Connor is Professor of History, Emeritus, and University Historian, Boston College. He is the author of numerous works on the history of Boston and New England.
Table of Contents
Preface: Footprints on the Sands of Time
Abigail Adams
Henry Adams
John Adams
Samuel Adams
Louis Agassiz
Louisa May Alcott
Fred Allen
George Thorndike Angell
Mary Antin
George Apley
Anthony Athanas
Crispus Attucks
Red Auerbach
Emily Greene Balch
George Bancroft
Bernard Berenson
Leonard Bernstein
William Blackstone
Nathaniel Bowditch
James Bowdoin
Anne Bradstreet
Laura Bridgman
Phillips Brooks
Orestes Brownson
Charles Bulfinch
Vannevar Bush
Sarah Caldwell
Melnea Cass
William Ellery Channing
Jean de Cheverus
Julia Child
Patrick Collins
James Brendan Connolly
John Singleton Copley
Allan Crite
James Michael Curley
Frances Greely Curtis
Richard J. Cushing
John Deferrari
Harry Ellis Dickson
Patrick Donahoe
Mary Dyer
Mary Baker Eddy
John Eliot
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Edward Everett
Peter Faneuil
Fannie Farmer
Arthur Fiedler
John F. Fitzgerald
John Bernard Fitzpatrick
Doug Flutie
John Murray Forbes
George Frazier
Margaret Fuller
Isabella Stewart Gardner
William Lloyd Garrison
Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore
Edward Everett Hale
Sarah Hale
John Hancock
Lewis Hayden
Henry Lee Higginson
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Julia Ward Howe
Samuel Gridley Howe
William Dean Howells
Anne Hutchinson
Thomas Hutchinson
William James
Eben Jordan, Jr.
Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy
Amos A. Lawrence
Elma Lewis
Mary Rice Livermore
Henry Cabot Lodge
Martin Lomasney
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
James Russell Lowell
Ralph Lowell
Horace Mann
Cotton Mather
Abigail Williams May
John W. McCormack
Donald McKay
Henry Morgan
Samuel Eliot Morison
Robert Morris
Elliot Norton
Hugh O'Brien
William Henry O'Connell
Julia O'Connor
Frederick Law Olmsted
John Boyle O'Reilly
Bobby Orr
Mary Kenney O'Sullivan
Theodore Parker
Francis Parkman
Elizabeth Palmer Peabody
Thomas Handasyd Perkins
King Philip
Josiah Quincy
Paul Revere
Henry Hobson Richardson
Leverett Saltonstall
Preston "Sandy" Sandiford
John Singer Sargent
Eleanora Randolph Sears
Samuel Sewall
Robert Gould Shaw
Louise Stokes
Lucy Stone
Gilbert Stuart
John L. Sullivan
Charles Sumner
Kip Tiernan
William Monroe Trotter
Frederick Tudor
John A. Volpe
John Collins Warren
Mercy Otis Warren
Edward Weeks
Dorothy West
Phillis Wheatley
Ted Williams
John Winthrop
Charles Wyzanski
Carl Yastrzemski
Thomas Yawkey
Leonard P. Zakim
Acknowledgments
Index