Ocean State Libraries

Within these pages, author Anthony Mitchell Sammarco brings to life the history of Boston's West End--the area of the city bound by the Charles River and Storrow Drive as well as North Station, City Hall Plaza, and Myrtle Street. Once a thriving, energetic, and diverse neighborhood, the West End was slated for complete removal following World War II. In over 200 marvelous photographs, this collection recaptures fond memories for former residents and...

The Back Bay was one of Boston's premier residential neighborhoods between 1837 and 1901. From its quagmire beginnings and with the creation of the Boston Public Garden in the 1830s, the Back Bay was envisioned as an urbane and sophisticated streetscape of stone and brick row houses. The major center of the neighborhood became Art Square, now known as Copley Square, which was surrounded by Trinity Church, New Old South Church, Second Church of Boston,...

Traces the history of Boston's North End, using more than one hundred vintage photographs and personal recollections from residents to highlight the events, people, and places that shaped its history.

Documents the arc of the Italian American immigrant experience on both sides of the Atlantic. As a young boy, Anthony V. Riccio listened to his grandparents' stories of life in the small Italian villages where they had grown up and which they had left in order to emigrate to the United States. In the early 1970s, he traveled to those villages-Alvignano and Sippiciano-and elsewhere in Italy, taking photographs of a way of life that had persisted for...

This book reconstructs important milestones in the lives of 2,808 white, native-born men who resided in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1860 or 1870. Selected systematically from the census for those two years, these men represent two cross-sections of those viewed by contemporaries as "typical" Bostonians.Using a broad array of sources--manuscript census returns; tax assessments; city directories; birth, marriage, and death records for more than twenty...

From the revolutionary camaraderie of the Colonial taverns to the saloons of the turn of the century; from Prohibition-a period rife with class politics, social reform, and opportunism-to a trail of nightclub neon so vast, it was called the "Conga Belt," Drinking Boston is a tribute to the fascinating role alcohol has played throughout the city's history.