Highlights of Boston History:
A Personal Perspective

Professor Thomas H. O'Connor

Professor Thomas H. O'Connor: Lowell Lecture

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Good evening ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for coming this evening to this year's annual Lowell Lecture. It has been a distinct pleasure and a great honor for me to have been named the Lowell lecturer for the year 2000-2001, especially in view of the long list of distinguished men and women who have come before me as Lowell lecturers. I am especially grateful to Dean Michael Shinagel and his very efficient staff for making the arrangements for such a hospitable and successful reception.

In keeping with the title listed in the attractive announcement for this particular lecture--"Highlights of Boston History: A Personal Perspective"--let me share with you this evening some of my personal views as well as a few of my professional experiences, as I look back upon many years of meandering through the city's history. If you thumb carefully through my recent book called Boston: A to Z, you will find it under the letter "L." There it is, right there on page 204, under the heading "The Lowell Institute." Under this heading I have offered my readers a brief description of the way in which, back in 1836, Mr. John Lowell, eldest son of the textile entrepreneur Francis Cabot Lowell, left half of his estate, amounting to some $250,000, for a fund that would underwrite, in perpetuity, programs of free public lectures for adult audiences. This was at a time, some 165 years ago, when New England was experiencing an amazing literary and cultural renaissance. The writer Van Wyck Brooks called it, appropriately enough, "the flowering of New England." Writers, philosophers, scientists, and artists like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Hickling Prescott, John Lothrop Motley, and many others--all of them prominent Yankees with three names, as James Michael Curley once pointed out, and almost all of them Harvard graduates--formed the basis of a glittering literati that became famous not only in Boston and Cambridge but throughout the world.

Professor Thomas H. O'Connor with audience members.

But this was also a time, a century and a half ago, when these intellectual leaders felt a definite obligation to extend the benefits of this cultural renaissance to every resident of Boston and Cambridge. These intellectual figures wanted to share what they knew with everyone else, regardless of age, class, station, or condition. "Boston, all of New England, respected learning," wrote Van Wyck Brooks. "No New England boy was allowed to question that he was destined to succeed in life, provided that he knew enough." And that was what the city leaders of that period determined to do--to make sure that every boy and girl, regardless of their class or condition, should have the opportunity to "know enough." Toward this end they worked not only through the established institutions of schools, colleges, and libraries, but they also went on to create a series of local self-education programs throughout the city so that they could spread that knowledge even further--and to even more people. John Lowell's project proved to be among the most successful of a number of similar enterprises that helped make what came to be known as "the lecture habit" a distinctive Boston phenomenon. On some occasions, as many as eight to ten thousand people applied for tickets to a particular course of lectures by a nationally known scholar--Benjamin Silliman in chemistry, James Russell Lowell in poetry, or Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edward Everett, or Oliver Wendell Holmes speaking about their own field of specialization or any subject they wanted to talk about that evening. The audience didn't really care what the topic was--they just wanted to sit back and listen to the Great Man speak!

My own personal association with the Harvard University Extension School--a modern version of the original Lowell Lecture Series created in 1909 by Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell--developed some 35 years ago. Dean Reginald Phelps called me up one evening and asked if I would be interested in teaching a course in American history at the Old South Meeting House, which, as I'm sure you all know, is located on Washington Street in downtown Boston. Actually, I must tell you that the call really came from the assistant dean, a wonderful man who served the School in many capacities for many years. Now, I wonder if you can imagine the reaction of a young professor of American history, sitting at home, when his wife answered the telephone, turned to him, and said: "It's John Adams calling--he says he's from Harvard."

Well, I recovered my composure, made sure it was not someone pulling my leg, and accepted the assignment. I had such a wonderful experience for several years that when, in the early 1970s, the new dean, Michael Shinagel, asked me to continue the same course in Harvard Yard, I indicated that I did not want to change. I enjoyed the adult students so much at the Boston location, I explained, that I could not imagine the students being that good in Cambridge. Dean Shinagel was very persuasive, however, and suggested that I give it a try--at least for a year. Needless to say, I found the adult students in Harvard Yard every bit as wonderful as those at the Old South Meeting House, and I have been happy and fortunate to have been invited back every year since. In fact, a short time later, Dean Shinagel suggested that I replace the general course I had been teaching on American history with a more specialized course on the history of Boston. This time I said yes right away, and have been (as many of you here this evening know) doing so ever since, with students who often know much more about the city's history than I do, and who often energize the classes by relating stories and anecdotes about their own lives and experiences. That's what makes the Extension experience really special, the give-and-take between the students and the instructors.

Just so you don't think I'm making this up, let me give you just one specific example: One night in late April, several years ago, I had finished a lecture about how Boston's African-American population had moved from the West End to a new location in the South End. I indicated that the following week I would discuss life and society in the South End during the period of the Second World War. As the members of the class were filing out, one of my students came up to me and said: "Now, Dr. O'Connor, you're talking about my neighborhood; you're talking about my history. I know all about those things." And so I said: "Well then, next week you come up here and tell the other students what it was like."

The gentleman's name was Reginald Weems, and we became good friends. He was a longtime resident of the South End, as was Allan Crite, a famous artist of that neighborhood and a well-known student at the Extension School. Reginald had worked for the post office for many years, had retired, and was enjoying the opportunity to expand his knowledge by taking courses at the Extension School. Bright, charming, and intelligent, he was a joy to have in the classroom. Sure enough, he showed up the next week with notes he had jotted down, and proceeded to give what I thought was a memorable lecture on his personal reminiscences of the jazz scene in Boston's South End during the 1950s. I asked him if he would write up those notes, and he did. I subsequently included references to his remarks in my book on urban renewal, properly documented and footnoted, of course.

Unfortunately, about two years ago Reginald Weems was struck down by a vehicle while he was crossing Harvard Square, and although early reports were encouraging, he died in the hospital. But many of us will recall Reginald as a lively and memorable figure around Harvard Yard, and an example of how much our adult students have to offer.

It may well have been reports about this particular course on the history of Boston that led to my latest association with Harvard. One day the telephone rang (sound familiar?) and it was Ms. Aida Donald, the senior editor of the Harvard University Press, about whom I had heard but never met. "Mr. O'Connor," she said for openers, "I have an idea for a book, and I think you're the person to do it."

"What kind of book?" I asked.

"It will be called Boston: A to Z," she answered.

"What does that mean?"

"Well, you take each letter of the alphabet," she replied, "and under each letter put as many topics as you can think of about Boston."

"What kind of topics?" I asked, still not convinced that the conversation was for real. Don't forget, I once got a call from John Adams!

"Oh, all kinds of topics," said Ms. Donald, "serious ones, funny ones, important ones, disreputable ones--all kinds."

"Oh, I don't think so, " I said. "I really don't think I'm the person you want for this."

"Oh, don't say no," she responded quickly, "meet me for lunch and we'll talk about it further."

Although I still had serious reservations, not only about the nature of the project but also my ability to carry it out, I agreed to try it for a couple of months. If it did not pan out, we agreed to part the best of friends. Now that I think about it, this sounds like the conversation I had with Michael Shinagel.

For a while, at the beginning, the scheme seemed rather hopeless, especially when I ran into some blank walls concerning what subject would go with what letter, or vice versa. Right away I got into trouble with the letter "Z"--what could possibly go with that letter--when my son turned to me and said simply: "Zoo, Dad, the Franklin Park Zoo." I got around that hurdle, but then ran into another blank wall--the letter "Q." Dealing with Boston history, of course, there was one obvious topic: Quincy Market. But that single "Q" looked awfully lonely all by itself, and I wanted at least one other word, but couldn't come up with one to save my soul. One day, having lunch with some colleagues at the faculty dining room, I was talking about this particular problem when one of them, a geologist, looked up and said: "What about the Quabbin Reservoir?" Just as I was about to respond "That's not in Boston!" I realized that that was where Boston got its water supply. And so you will find under "Q" a little historical essay about how Boston got its water.

It was getting better as time went on, and I was even able to draw upon my classes at the Harvard Extension School for some inspiration. I clearly recalled one evening, lecturing over at Harvard Hall on some aspect of nineteenth-century Boston (someone here this evening might even recall the incident) when a young woman off to my left raised her hand somewhat tentatively. When I acknowledged her, she asked: "Dr. O'Connor, what is this thing you keep referring to as 'The Hub?'" Conscious of the hush that followed her question and the curious looks she got from the other students around her, she shrugged her shoulders and said simply, "Look, I'm from Oregon." So I felt I had to include under the letter "H," as a tribute to one of our visiting students, an explanation of the term "The Hub."

You will find a good deal of this book is somewhat nostalgic. It contains a number of topics, personalities, and events you can find in many earlier books about the historic city of Boston, or in personal memoirs like those of the famous Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison. He wrote a book called One Boy's Boston that provides absolutely delightful reminiscences about what it was like to grow up in "his" Boston--the Beacon Hill and Back Bay area--at the turn of the century. And in my book, as well as in my classes, you will find many of the topics appropriate to that early period: the Boston Athenaeum, the Old South Meeting House, the Old State House, the Old Granary Burying Ground, and all those other famous historic sites that visitors and tourists can find along the Freedom Trail.

But my Boston also covers a much wider geographical area than Professor Morison's "tight little island" around Brimmer Street a century ago. The city you'll read about here extends out from the old central city into the various ethnic neighborhoods of Boston, which became the homes of the city's first generations of immigrants. You will find evidence of the more recent ethnic history of the city with topics like Bluehill Avenue and the Vilna Shul, the West End and the African Meeting House, the Famine Memorial, the Holocaust Memorial, and an amazing form of neighborhood architecture called the Three-Decker, many of which are currently being transformed into incredibly expensive condominiums. And there are, of course, the fascinating people who populated the neighborhoods and gave their influence to shaping and reshaping the city's history, people like Phillis Wheatley, John Boyle O'Reilly, William Monroe Trotter, James Michael Curley, and Melnea Cass. All these people, once unknown and unrecognized, and too often unaccepted, have by this time become an important and integral part of the city's history.

But today we live in a new century, a new time. My work had not only to recall many features of the "Old Boston," but also had to reflect the numerous changes that have taken place in recent years in the course of what we now refer to as the "New Boston." The city is now a different place, with different people, in a different era. It is no longer a nineteenth-century town of gaslights, cobblestones, and horse-drawn carriages. For better or for worse, it is a modern, bustling twenty-first-century metropolis. As I leave my Extension class every Thursday night and drive from Cambridge to Boston across the Longfellow Bridge, I am acutely conscious of the new skyscrapers of steel and glass that have gone up in the city that as late as the 1960s could boast only the Custom House Tower as the single tall building marking the city's skyline. We have seen new highways and expressways snake their way through the town, while advanced technologies have transformed the whole financial superstructure of a city whose economy was once based on the income from merchant ships and textile factories.

But in addition to the physical and structural changes of what most of us familiarly call the "New Boston," we have also seen, especially in the last 25 years, an amazing influx of "New Bostonians." The official reports of the 2000 federal census now tell us officially what many of us have already observed for some time. Boston is rapidly becoming less white. In the ten years between 1990 and the year 2000, for example, the Asian population of the city has nearly doubled; the Latino population has grown by some 37 percent. Many more African-Americans, Latinos, and Asians are fast becoming an integral part of the Boston scene and infusing the city with new strains of racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity. It is easy for us to appreciate the fact that Boston is no longer the town of John Winthrop, Anne Hutchinson, and Cotton Mather; we know it is no longer the city of The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table and The Late George Apley. But how many of us also recognize the fact that it is no longer the city of Honey Fitz, James Michael Curley, or John F. Kennedy; that it has, even now, gone beyond the days of The Last Hurrah and The Friends of Eddie Coyle? All those things are certainly part of the city's past, of course; but they are not necessarily part of its future. Instead of Puritans and Yankees, Irish and Italians, Boston is increasingly the home of African-Americans, Latino-Americans, and Asian-Americans. These are our "New Bostonians."

One of the things that has fascinated me about studying Boston history for so many years has been the way it has been able to adapt to amazing changes over the course of 300 years without losing its essential character and personality as a truly "special" city. During the colonial period, for example, it was able to replace colonial rule with its own form of responsible statehood. In the early nineteenth century it successfully substituted an industrial technology for its former maritime supremacy. It developed a remarkable range of humanitarian institutions, including public schools, a public library, and numerous charitable institutions for the less fortunate, and promoted reform movements that eventually led to the freedom of slaves and the emancipation of women. It managed to adjust an unusually rigid and homogenous society to eventually accommodate both ethnic diversity and religious difference. All without losing those civic virtues and intellectual accomplishments that it felt it had to keep because they defined its unique characteristics as a special city and a distinctive place to live.

And that, I would suggest this evening, is Boston's challenge for tomorrow. I feel it should continue to combine the old with the new, the past with the present, the traditional with the different. And in this process, it is especially important for Boston to restore the preeminence of academic excellence, together with its philosophy of intellectual opportunity, that once led city leaders to believe that every man and woman, regardless of their backgrounds, should have the chance to "know enough" in order to improve their lives and enhance their future. It is in this respect that I see a greater need than ever for the kind of civic and social responsibility first demonstrated by John Lowell, with his educational institute, and continued today by the Harvard Extension School. It is essential for the city to provide social and educational opportunities for all of its citizens--especially the latest of the newcomers from various lands and different cultures, as well as developing creative and even ingenious methods of introducing new Bostonians to the truly unique history and culture of Boston, and demonstrating how it relates to their own backgrounds and their own traditions.

In the course of one of the slide lectures I give in my course on the history of Boston, there is a shot of the Romanesque details of Henry Hobson Richardson's Trinity Church in Copley Square beautifully reflected in the glass siding of the nearby John Hancock Tower. Now, here are two buildings that are completely different, centuries apart in structure and design. They obviously don't belong together, and one would think that ordinarily they could not possibly be reconciled. And yet--on a bright and sunny day--they come together in a striking medley of shape and color. They actually blend. They become one. And I often think that in a city where churches, federal townhouses, Greek-revival market buildings can exist side by side with Victorian mansions, Gothic cathedrals, and high-rise skyscrapers, then it seems to me entirely possible--especially when the skies are bright and the day is sunny--to live together in a similar spirit of tolerance and harmony. If the lessons of the past 300 years can be brought to bear on the challenges of the future, then I feel that the coming years of the millennium can be years of considerable promise and substantial achievement.

About Professor O'Connor

Professor Thomas H. O'Connor presented this year's Lowell Lecture on May 1, 2001. Sponsored jointly by the Lowell Institute of Boston and the Harvard Extension School, the Lowell Lecture series has been an annual public event for more than 20 years.

Professor O'Connor is the Dean of Historians of Boston, a distinguished role he has earned by his many books written in the last decade on his favorite subject. In 1991 the Boston Public Library published the third edition of his book titled Bibles, Brahmins, and Bosses: A Short History of Boston. This was followed by Building a New Boston (1993), South Boston: The History of an Ethnic Neighborhood (1994), The Boston Irish: A Political History (1995), Civil War Boston: Homefront and Battlefield (1997), and Boston Catholics: A History of the Church and Its People (1998), all published by the Northeastern University Press. In the year 2000 his book Boston: A to Z was published by the Harvard University Press.

Professor O'Connor is also the author of books and scholarly articles on United States history and the Civil War, including Lords of the Loom: The Cotton Whigs and the Coming of the Civil War (1968), The Disunited States: The United States in the Era of Civil War and Reconstruction (1972; reprinted in 1974 and 1978), and Religion and American Society (1975). He is the author or co-author of several textbooks on American history, notably The Heritage of the American People (1965).

However, to thousands of Harvard Extension School students and alumni Professor O'Connor is not known for his prolific publications, but for his popular two-semester course: The History of Boston, 1630-1865 and The History of Boston, 1865 to the Present. These courses are perennial favorites with Extension students, attracting an average of 150 enrollees in each course and ranking among the top ten courses each semester. He is also a favorite speaker at Harvard Extension Alumni Association functions, particularly the annual Boston Harbor cruise.

A native of South Boston and a graduate of the Boston Latin School, Professor O'Connor received his AB and MA degrees from Boston College and his PhD degree from Boston University. He has been teaching American history at Boston College since 1950, served as department chairman from 1962 to 1970, and was named University Historian.

Professor O'Connor is a member of the board of trustees of the Bostonian Society, a resident fellow at the Massachusetts Historical Society, and was, re-appointed by Governor Celucci as a member of the Massachusetts Archive Commission. He was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters by Boston College in 1993; in 1999 he was the recipient of the annual Gold Medal Award from the Eire Society of Boston.

Top photo photographer unknown. Bottom photo by Jeffry Pike.