Boston, MA
Boston was founded in 1630 by Puritan settlers led by John Winthrop and quickly became the political, economic, and cultural center of colonial New England. It was here that events such as the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, and the Siege of Boston ignited the movement for American independence, earning the city its title as the "Cradle of Liberty." Beyond the Revolution, Boston has continued to shape the nation through its leadership in education, medicine, literature, and innovation. For me, Boston has always been more than a historic city. Living nearby and returning countless times over the years, it has been a place where history comes alive, reminding me that the story of America can be found on nearly every street corner.
Recent Posts
The Bulfinch Building
Standing within the enormous Massachusetts General Hospital campus is a building that looks almost modest compared with the medical complex that now surrounds it. The Bulfinch Building is the original home of Massachusetts General Hospital and has stood here for more than two centuries. Its classical façade, columned portico and triangular pediment provide a striking […]
Old West Church
Walking through the streets around Massachusetts General Hospital, Marty and I kept stopping to photograph buildings that caught our attention. Old West Church was one of them. Behind an iron fence on Cambridge Street stands this handsome red-brick church with its tall arched windows, clock tower and white steeple. The plaques along the fence revealed […]
The Bowdoin School
Walking through Beacon Hill, it is easy to concentrate on the neighborhood’s famous Federal-era houses. But scattered among them are buildings that tell a different part of Boston’s story. This substantial brick building on Myrtle Street was once the Bowdoin School, a public school whose history reaches back well before the building we see today. […]
Puffer’s Building
Walking through the streets around Massachusetts General Hospital, Marty and I kept coming across buildings that made us stop and look. This one immediately caught my attention. Rising above Cambridge Street, its red-brick façade is interrupted by an extraordinary three-story projecting bay covered in green-patinated metal. Across the front, worked into the metal itself, are […]
Surgery Before Anesthesia
Among the small historical displays in Massachusetts General Hospital’s Bulfinch Building, this one caught my attention because it asks us to imagine something that is almost incomprehensible today: undergoing surgery while fully conscious and able to feel what was happening. Before reliable surgical anesthesia became available in the nineteenth century, physicians had surprisingly few ways […]
Dr John Collins Warren
Among the photographs displayed within the historic Bulfinch Building at Massachusetts General Hospital is this remarkable portrait of Dr. John Collins Warren. Standing formally dressed with one hand resting on a human skull, Warren looks very much like a nineteenth-century physician and anatomist. Yet his connection to this building goes much deeper. He was one […]
The Massachusetts Historical Society
I have passed countless historic buildings in Boston, but on this visit I had a particular reason for walking through the doors of the Massachusetts Historical Society. I had come to see a special exhibition devoted to the history of the Irish in Boston. A story that is inseparable from the history of the city itself. […]
Headquarters of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (SPNEA)
I have already written about the Otis House as one of Boston’s important historic homes, but seeing this plaque on the building opened another story. The house is significant not only because of the people who once lived within it. For more than a century, it has also been closely associated with an organization devoted […]
William Hickling Prescott
Walking through Boston’s Beacon Hill, it is easy to admire the elegant brick homes and historic streets without realizing how many remarkable people once lived behind these doors. One of those homes belonged to William Hickling Prescott, one of the nineteenth century’s most celebrated American historians. From 1845 until his death in 1859, Prescott lived […]
The Founders Memorial
Standing on Boston Common, the Founders Memorial commemorates the beginning of Boston’s story. Dedicated in 1930 during the city’s 300th anniversary celebration, the monument marks the founding of Boston in 1630 and honors the people whose decisions transformed a small peninsula known as Shawmut into one of America’s most influential cities. The centerpiece of the […]
The Ether Dome
My first visit to Massachusetts General Hospital was for a consultation appointment. The hospital complex is enormous, a collection of buildings representing generations of growth and changes in medicine. Yet as I moved through the hospital, I kept noticing one building. Looking out from what seemed like almost every window was the magnificent Bulfinch Building, […]
The Abiel Smith School
As Marty and I walked through the streets of Boston with no particular destination, we came across this brick building on the north slope of Beacon Hill. It is the Abiel Smith School, and behind its relatively simple exterior is an important and complicated story about education, segregation, and Boston’s nineteenth-century Black community. The school […]
