South Boston My Home Town

An engaging yet objective look at the 350-year old history of "Southie," a neighborhood that has survived largely unchanged since the early days of immigrant Irish families and old-time political bosses.

An engaging yet objective look at the 350-year old history of "Southie," a neighborhood that has survived largely unchanged since the early days of immigrant Irish families and old-time political bosses. Originally published by Quinlan Press in 1988 and reprinted by Northeastern University Press in 1994. With a new foreword by Lawrence W. Kennedy.

This collection is both a tribute to the distinguished work of Thomas H. O'Connor, the dean of Boston historians, and a survey of the best and innovative contemporary work on Boston's diverse histories.

The anti-busing riots of 1974 forever changed Southie, Boston's working class Irish community, branding it as a violent, racist enclave. Michael Patrick MacDonald grew up in Southie's Old Colony housing project. He describes the way this world within a world felt to the troubled yet keenly gifted observer he was even as a child: "[as if] we were protected, as if the whole neighborhood was watching our backs for threats, watching for all the enemies we could never really define." But the threats-poverty, drugs, a shadowy gangster world-were real. MacDonald lost four of his siblings to violence and poverty. All Souls is heart-breaking testimony to lives lost too early, and the story of how a place so filled with pain could still be "the best place in the world." We meet Ma, Michael's mini-skirted, accordian-playing, usually single mother who cares for her children—there are eventually eleven—through a combination of high spirits and inspired "getting over." And there are Michael's older siblings—Davey, sweet artist-dreamer; Kevin, child genius of scam; and Frankie, Golden Gloves boxer and neighborhood hero—whose lives are high-wire acts played out in a world of poverty and pride. But too soon Southie becomes a place controlled by resident gangster Whitey Bulger, later revealed to be an FBI informant even as he ran the drug culture that Southie supposedly never had. It was a world primed for the escalation of class violence-and then, with deadly and sickening inevitability, of racial violence that swirled around forced busing. MacDonald, eight years old when the riots hit, gives an explosive account of the asphalt warfare. He tells of feeling "part of it all, part of something bigger than I'd ever imagined, part of something that was on the national news every night." Within a few years-a sequence laid out in All Souls with mesmerizing urgency-the neighborhood's collapse is echoed by the MacDonald family's tragedies. All but destroyed by grief and by the Southie code that doesn't allow him to feel it, MacDonald gets out. His work as a peace activist, first in the all-Black neighborhoods of nearby Roxbury, then back to the Southie he can't help but love, is the powerfully redemptive close to a story that will leave readers utterly shaken and changed.

A history of and collectors' guide to nineteenth-century glass manufacturing in South Boston

"On June 15, 1929, with Dr. John G. Cullinan, Reverend Thomas J. Hill and Father Healy by his side, William Swanton signed his name for the very last time . I wasn't there, of course, but I can imagine him raising his pen with an age-spotted, quivering hand to the document presented to him on his deathbed. This document would affect the lives of many people for many years to come. William's story, however, begins 74 years earlier in rural County Cork, Ireland." This book chronicles the lives of William Swanton and his wife, Anne (O'Neil) Swanton. They were born in neighboring townlands in rural County Cork and immigrated to Boston, where they lived until the 1920s. William Swanton was a larger-than-life figure who cut a wide swath as he charged through life. Accounts of rural country life, chain migration, women's rights, upward mobility in a new country, venereal disease, marital separation and insanity all provide a fascinating glimpse into the past.

South Boston, once a part of Dorchester, was annexed to the city of Boston in 1804. Previously known as a tight-knit community of Polish, Lithuanian, and Irish Americans, South Boston has seen tremendous growth and unprecedented change in the last decade.

During the early part of the 20th century, technological advances in the printing industry spawned a new fad: postcard collecting. Publishers dispatched photographers to communities throughout the country and produced iconic images that formed a portrait of the nation. Travelers used postcards to communicate with friends and family and to maintain a visual record of their itineraries. Although the fad was short lived, thousands of postcards and, in some cases, entire collections survive to this day. Through vintage postcards, South Boston shows one of Bostons most beautiful neighborhoods with miles of sandy beaches, shaded thoroughfares, and well-kept brick and wood frame homes. South Boston is an Irish American enclave that has probably undergone fewer physical and social changes than any other section of the city.