A People’s History Of The New Boston: Introduction

April 20, 2022

(One in a series of posts on Jim Vrabel’s 2014 book, A People’s History Of The New Boston.)

Jim Vrabel’s invaluable book, A People’s History Of The New Boston, isn’t just a model for how to write local history, it’s also a model for aging baby boomers (or really, anyone) looking for what to do with all that energy, knowledge, and skill they’ve poured into their work lives. Vrabel, a longtime municipal employee, had and has a passion for Boston history. At some point he started structuring his job so that he had most Fridays off to indulge his hobby. Over decades he built up a database spanning 17,000 years of Boston history with tens of thousands of entries on the city’s buildings, artifacts, and significant events. And in 2014, he published A People’s History, jam-packed with stories about the people, places, organizations, and events that helped reshape Boston in the second half of the 20th century.

As you read, you’ll notice most of the chapters follow the same simple pattern: a short opening section that sets the scene, a recounting of the struggle (over control of and access to land, housing, schools, transportation, jobs, public services and benefits—the stuff of urban politics) that relies primarily on local news coverage at the time and Vrabel’s own later interviews with participants, and then a brief summary of the outcome and its significance. It’s workmanlike in the best sense of the word. You can imagine Vrabel going to the archives to look at microfilm (or microfiche, or computer databases), copying the relevant articles, tracking down participants who are still around, conducting his own interviews with them, reading what other historians had written (if anything), and then writing up a chapter using the outline he’d developed for himself. And then onto the next story. Wash, rinse, and repeat twenty or so times and you’ve got a book that both preserves an essential part of your community’s history and ensures that future historians will have to take your work into account when they look back on this era. Vrabel’s passion is history, but the model of what he’s done applies to pretty much any other individual passion, hobby, or interest that, followed with intent and purpose, can result in a lasting civic good.

Like Howard Zinn’s A People’s History Of The United States (to which it owes an obvious debt), A People’s History Of The New Boston is not meant to be read alone. It’s the second book you should read about post-WW II Boston, not the first one. It is, as Vrabel explains in his “Introduction”, an intentionally “selective…collective…collaborative…detailed…partisan…roughly chronological…collective” history of Boston from the 1950s into the early 21st century.

“The ‘New Boston’ only came into being in the second half of the twentieth century…. Credit for building the New Boston Usually goes to a small group of ‘city fathers’—all of them men, all of them white, and most of them well-off…. But that is only half of the story.” (p. 1)

Vrabel bluntly and clearly states that his book “attempts to tell the other half of the story. It gives credit to many more people—women as well as men; black, brown, and yellow as well as white; the poor and working class as well as the well-off. This story focuses on how those people made Boston a more humane and a morally better city, and it extends to Boston’s neighborhoods.” (pp. 1-2)

It’s a story of organizing, activism, and protest “…the likes of which the city hadn’t seen since the fight for abolition and, prior to that, the beginnings of the American Revolution. Like that revolution, this one was directed at an insensitive or inept government and selfish business interests. That first revolution, however, was directed at a king, a parliament, and companies an ocean away. This one took aim at government and business interests here at home. That first revolution gave birth to a new nation, conceived in liberty and equality. This one helped make a city much more of, by, and for its people.” (p. 2)

The idea that “sometimes the people knew better”, Vrabel concludes, “appears to have been the common denominator in all the protest that followed.” Win, lose, or draw; right, wrong, or morally ambiguous; “all of the protest and activism sprang from a desire on the part of the people to gain more power over their lives and to make Boston better—and, in most cases, they succeeded.” (pp. 3-4)

Which is why A People’s History Of The New Boston is so valuable, and the stories Vrabel has methodically documented and assembled deserve to be told and retold: people really can change their world, and for the better.

Other posts in this series:

A People’s History Of The New Boston: What Was Wrong With The Old Boston?

A People’s History Of The New Boston: To Hell With Urban Renewal

A People’s History Of The New Boston: Community Organizers & Advocacy Planners

A People’s History Of The New Boston: A Rekindled Civil Rights Movement

A People’s History Of The New Boston: School Reform & Desegregation

A People’s History Of The New Boston: The Conflict Over The Vietnam Conflict

A People’s History Of The New Boston: The Media & The Protest Movements

A People’s History Of The New Boston: Mothers For Adequate Welfare

A People’s History Of The New Boston: The Illusion Of Inclusion & Assault By Acronyms

A People’s History Of The New Boston: Gentrification & The South End

A People’s History Of The New Boston: Do-It-Yourself Community Development