Tag: History

Book Review: Boston Catholics

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Author: Thomas H. O’Connor
Title: Boston Catholics : A History of the Church and its People
Publication Info: Boston : Northeastern University Press, c1998.
Other Books Read By the Same Author:

Summary/Review:

Boston Catholics is a history of the church in Boston from colonial times to the end of the 20th century.  It offers an interesting overview of how Catholics grew from a persecuted minority to the dominant faith in the city.  The early parts of this book were particularly interesting with the official creation of a diocese after the Revolution under the leadership of French bishop Jean-Louis Lefebvre de Cheverus.  It was interesting to learn that while Puritan Boston persecuted Catholics in colonial Boston and nativist violence against Catholics rose in the mid-1800s, there was actually a period in-between when the French clergy ingratiated themselves with Yankee Protestants and enjoyed greater tolerance.  Albeit, this was when the number of Catholics in Boston was quite small, but soon would swell with the immigration of Irish Americans who took control of the diocese from the French Americans.

While I found the book an interesting and well-written survey of Catholic history in Boston, there were a few things that troubled me.  First, O’Connor structures the book around the bishops/archbishops of Boston and each section of the book focus on their leadership and influence on the church.  While this could be a meta-commentary on the top-down hierarchy of the Church, I would’ve liked to see more about the ordinary Catholics about whom O’Connor only writes in general terms.  Second, while the Irish American domination of the archdiocese is evident, I was surprised at how little O’Connor wrote about Catholics from other backgrounds.  Even Italian Americans only got a few pages of the narrative, while the contemporary emergence of Boston Catholic communities originating from Haiti, Latin America, and Southeast Asia are simply mentioned.  Finally, I feel that O’Connor’s respect and love for the Church made it difficult for him to write from a neutral position as a historian.

Of course, the biggest thing that’s missing from the book is due to the fact that it was published in 1998.  While O’Connor mentions cases of clergy sexual abuse of children, the full extent of the abuse and the Archdiocese’s coverup were not revealed until 2002. The scandal forever damaged the Church in Boston and ordinary Catholics relationships with the Archdiocese and their parishes.  Had the book been written a few years later it would not only be a significant addition to the history, but would also recontexualized much of the history O’Connor wrote about the Church in the 20th century.  Even beyond the sexual abuse crisis, there’s irony near the end of the book when O’Connor praises Cardinal Bernard Law for look to the future by creating Caritas Christi Health Care to manage Catholic hospitals in the city.  Caritas Christi was later sold to private equity and became Steward Health Care System, which due to financial mismanagement went bankrupt in 2024, leading to the oldest Catholic hospital in Boston – Carney Hospital – permanently closing.  It leaves a bitter taste to read O’Connor’s optimistic appraisal of Boston Catholicism knowing what has happened in the ensuing three decades.

Rating: ***

Book Review: Blank Space by W. David Marx

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Author: W. David Marx
Title: Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century
Narrator: Frits Zernike
Publication Info: Books on Tape, 2025
Summary/Review:

Living in a college town, I often find myself in crowds of students and noticing that they dress pretty much the same as when I was in college in the early 1990s. With some exceptions like the rise of athleisure making yoga pants casual wear, the everyday fashions of young adults was frozen 30 years ago.  Which is strange, because of you look at photos of young adults from the 1920s to 1990s, the fashions vary widely between decades and even within a decade.  Similarly, the 20th Century saw the emergence of new musical styles every few years but arguably no new genres have been born since the 1980s.  This is not to say there isn’t good music, and a lot of artists are doing interesting things across genres, but a lot of pop songs from 2025 sound like they could’ve been released in 2000 and vice versa.

I was hoping this book would give me some insight into this flattening of culture.  My experience is that this book is a good if sometimes exhausting litany of twenty-five years of pop culture, a litany of music, fashion, reality TV, and internet culture.  But I don’t find myself always agreeing with Marx’s analysis of what created this culture.  He does make a good point about artists being omnivores, thus the creative mashups and remixes of existing culture.  But he also calls 21st century culture a “monoculture” when I find that cultural touchpoints are actually more fractured than in the 20th century. His examples of monoculture include frequent references to things I’ve never even heard of, like the Bathing Apes clothing line.  I suppose though that it is harder for niche cultures to remain niche thus not allowing subcultures to persist.

The book is very depressing in its analysis, particularly charging the millennial generation with compromising with consumerism (a harsh analysis in my view).  He frequently cites the philosophical battle of poptomism versus rockism.  Now I previously understood poptomism as appreciating that popular music, even silly love songs, can still be good art while rockism insisted only white dudes with guitars were worth listening.  But according to Marx, rockists are artists with ____ values who don’t sell out, while poptomism is assigning value to pop cultural artifacts solely based on their financial success.  Marx also chronicles how right wing politics evolved within this cultural milieu.  Conservatives when from “stuffed shirts” to selling themselves as cool and transgressive, an unfortunately successful counter-counter-culture in some sectors of society.

Overall, I think there’s a lot of interesting details in this book that can provoke further discussion even if I’m not always on the same page as Marx. In the introduction, Marx admits that his observations are limited to the United States and the fields of his specialties.  But even within that framework, there’s a lot more to be said about 21st century culture than can fit in a single narrative.

Recommended books:

Rating: ***

Movie Review: Blue Moon (2025)

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Title: Blue Moon
Release Date: October 17, 2025
Director: Richard Linklater
Production Company: Detour Filmproduction | Renovo Media Group
Main Cast:

  • Ethan Hawke as Lorenz Hart
  • Margaret Qualley as Elizabeth Weiland
  • Bobby Cannavale as Eddie
  • Andrew Scott as Richard Rodgers
  • Jonah Lees as Morty Rifkin
  • Simon Delaney as Oscar Hammerstein II
  • Cillian Sullivan as Stephen Sondheim
  • Patrick Kennedy as E. B. White
  • John Doran as Weegee
  • Anne Brogan as Frieda Hart
  • David Rawle as George Roy Hill

Synopsis (via Letterboxd):

On the evening of March 31, 1943, legendary lyricist Lorenz Hart confronts his shattered self-confidence in Sardi’s bar as his former collaborator, Richard Rodgers, celebrates the opening night of his ground-breaking hit musical, “Oklahoma!”

My Thoughts:

This film is a fictionalized story about the lyricist Lorenz Hart, who wrote dozens of songs for the Great American Songbook from the 1920s to 1940s.  Unlike the typical biopic, this movie takes place on one night Sardi’s restaurant in New York in March 1943.  Hart and his long-time partner Richard Rodgers have fallen out, partly over artistic differences, but mostly because Hart’s alcoholism has made him too unreliable.  The film takes place on the opening night of Oklahoma!, Rodgers first work with his new partner Oscar Hammerstein II. Hart dismisses Oklahoma! while also recognizing it will change musical theater.  The movie plays out over a series of dialogues, which sometimes seem like monologues since Hart likes to talk a lot.  In a strange way it reminds me of My Dinner With Andre, with theater and intellectual concepts being the topics of conversation.

Hart’s conversations with Rodgers basically boil down to Hart considering Rodgers too sentimental and Rodgers considering Hart too vulgar.  But their admiration for one another’s work and their lost partnership also shines through their arguments.In addition to the show’s opening, Hart is also at Sardi’s to meet with Elizabeth Weiland.  Elizabeth is a 20-year-old college student who looks to Hart as a mentor, but Hart wants something more from their relationship.  Their conversations reveal the extent of Hart’s self-delusion and it so painful.

Ethan Hawke’s performance is excellent as he really immerses himself in the role, and the supporting cast are great as well.  Sometimes the movie gets a little too precious as it implies that Hart inspired the works of other creators including E.B. White, Stephen Sondheim, and George Roy Hill.  But overall, this is a film with a strong script that provides a lot of humor that colors  that sadness at the heart of the story.  It also does a great job of capturing the atmosphere of old-time Broadway.

Rating:  ****

Book Review: The Complete Book of 1930s Broadway Musicals by Dan Dietz

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Author: Dan Dietz
Title: The Complete Book of 1930s Broadway Musicals
Publication Info: Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield, [2018]
Other Books Read By the Same Author:

Summary/Review:

I’ve gone backward in time in this series on the history of Broadway musical theater, but superficially there’s a lot similarity between the 1930s and 1940s.  That is, lots and lots of musical revues, and a fair number of operettas, even though many of them have short runs.  But this is also the peak period of book musicals by Rodgers and Hart, George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, and Kurt Weill among others.  So many musical standards were born on the Broadway stage in the 1930s.  Being the Great Depression, the theater was also more political than in some other eras, ranging from satires like Of Thee I Sing, to the anti-war musical Hooray for What!, to the International Ladies Garment Workers Union’s musical revue Pins and Needles, to the leftist opera The Cradle Will Rock. Black entertainers continue to make inroads creating and performing a variety of musical revues, jazz twists on old operettas, and the all-Black cast and direction of Gertrude Stein’s experimental opera Four Saints in Three Acts. At the other end of the spectrum, Olsen and Johnson had their greatest success with Hellzapoppin’ which set a new record with a run of 1,404 performances. Dietz offers a wealth of detail for each an every show on Broadway as well as past and future productions of the same show, and shows that failed during their pre-Broadway tryouts.

Rating: ****

Book Review: The Architecture of Charles Bulfinch by Harold Kirker

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Author: Harold Kirker
Title: The Architecture of Charles Bulfinch
Publication Info: Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1969.
Summary/Review:

This book provides a summary of every building known to be designed by Charles Bulfinch or credited to him.  While I’d prefer a history more centered on Bulfinch as a person and the people who used his buildings, this book does exactly what it sets out to do.  There are a lot of interesting tidbits about Bulfinch and his career scattered throughout.

First of all, I am surprised by how many Bulfinch works have been demolished including some that made it well into the 20th century.  The saddest loss may be New South Church in downtown Boston which Reverend George Ellis described as one of Bulfinch’s most beautiful works only 4 years before it’s demolishing in 1868.  I had always assumed that Bulfinch started in Boston and then moved on to other areas as his reputation grew, but two of his earliest commissions were for churches in Pittsfield and Taunton.  He also started a state house for Connecticut in Hartford a couple of years before beginning work on the Massachusetts State House.  Bulfinch also designed the Maine State House at the end of his career, which should make him the only architect to design three state capitol buildings (Massachusetts and Maine are still in use)!

Bulfinch was not able to earn much from his profession and also served on Boston’s board of selectmen.  As chairman from 1799 to 1817, Bulfinch essentially held a position akin to mayor in the years before Boston was chartered as a city.  He was able to focus on city planning allowing him to influence the design of Boston beyond his architectural work.  As chairman he also hosted President James Monroe on his 1817 visit to Boston.  This lead to a job offer as Bulfinch was appointed Architect of the United States Capitol.  Bulfinch was responsible for continuing construction after British troops burned the capital in the War of 1812.  He was humble and diplomatic in deferring to the plans of his predecessor Benjamin Latrobe rather than creating his own design.  Bulfinch completed the Capitol in 1829 although his dome has since been obscured by the present-day dome.

Recommended books:

  • Boston: A Topographical History by Walter Muir Whitehill

Rating: ***1/2

Book Review: The Complete Book of 1940s Broadway Musicals by Dan Dietz

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Author: Dan Dietz
Title: The Complete Book of 1940s Broadway Musicals
Publication Info: Lanham, Maryland : Rowman & Littlefield, [2015]
Summary/Review:

When I read Anything Goes, I thought it would be nice to have a chronological list of Broadway musicals with data and summaries for each to complement Ethan Mordden’s stream-of-conscious essay style.  This is what Dan Dietz provides in his series of books for each decade from the 1900s to the 2010s with comprehensive descriptions of every musical, opera, operetta, play with music, and musical revue performed on Broadway (as well as shows that closed during tryouts).  This particular book documents the 273 musicals of the 1940s, the decade when Oklahoma! kicked off the modern musical.  For each entry there is a list of performance dates, theaters, cast and crew, song list (as well as sketches and dances when appropriate) and a summary based on programs and critic’s reviews.  The author also includes information about subsequent revivals, cast recordings, film and TV adaptations, and filmed stage productions. While it’s basically a reference book, I found it so engaging I read it straight through.

Some trends of 1940s musicals I observed:

  • Despite Oklahoma! redefining the book musical, the musical revue built around celebrity entertainers was still big, even though a lot of them closed swiftly.
  • Vaudeville may have been dead but a lot of vaudeville veterans were doing vaudeville-y things in these revues.
  • At the other end of the spectrum, future TV pioneers like Sid Caesar, Milton Berle, and Jackie Gleason were getting there start.
  • Revivals of operettas were also common and the contemporary critics really hated them for their predictable tropes.
  • I was surprised by the number of shows with Black performers.  There were, of course, shows created by well-intentioned white writers/composers that are a bit cringy, but also shows created by Black artists.  And Fats Waller became the first Black composer for a show with a mostly white cast when Early to Bed opened in 1943.  Sadly, Waller died during the shows run so he didn’t get to continue his Broadway career.
  • World War II affected Broadway with a show my a company of European refugees early in the decade, and the revues made up entirely of U.S. military once American entered the war.  Post-war shows thematically examine the war and life on the homefront as well.
  • Broadway today is criticized for big, sensational shows, celebrity casting, and reusing already popular intellectual property, but there was a lot of that in the 1940s as well.  One example is a multi-media adaptation of Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days with massive props and audience participation.  The extravaganza featured music by Cole Porter and a book by Orson Welles who also starred in the show.  It sounds like it would’ve been awesome, but it bombed.
  • Some other productions that just seem bonkers include large-scale revues with Broadway performers at the World’s Fair, one theater’s stage converted to a skating rink for musical ice revues that played the entire decade, and Olsen and Johnson’s bizarre comedy spectaculars which erased the line between the stage and the house.  Dietz writes that this type of show could never be revived today, which is a shame because they sound like a lot of fun.

Recommended books:

Rating: ****

Book Review: People Before Highways by Karilyn Crockett

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Author: Karilyn Crockett
Title: People Before Highways: Boston Activists, Urban Planners and a New Movement for City Making
Publication Info: University of Massachusetts Press (2018)
Summary/Review:

Everything about the highways seemed inevitable.  The 1948 Master Highway Plan for Metropolitan Area laid out the arterial routes for expressways entering Boston from every direction, connected by circumferential routes. The future of New Boston depended on increasing the capacity for motor vehicles in order to prevent traffic congestion.  There’s just one problem – those highways would cut through neighborhoods where people lived and worked.  By the early 1960s, people in Boston and Cambridge were beginning to ask why their homes should be sacrificed for the highways, or should their property be spared, why they should live next to noisy, polluting cars speeding by.

Karilyn Crockett provides an in-depth account of the neighborhood activists, civil rights leaders, priests and pastors, civic-minded college students, and a new generation of urban designers and engineers who came together to oppose the Southwest Expressway and the Inner Belt. While initially coming together with modest proposals to reroute the highways, more and more people became determined that the highways should not be built at all.  While Boston was not the site of America’s first highway revolt, it was perhaps the most successful and one that had nationwide ramifications.  In 1970, Governor Francis W. Sargent ordered a review of highway plans that lead to the cancellation of all the expressway plans within the 128 beltway.

This wouldn’t have been possible without the work and activism of hundreds of people, and Crockett does a great job of finding and interviewing many of these people for their stories.  She also discovered that many people kept personal and community archives of their antihighway work which provide valuable records for her research.  The organization of numerous groups and individuals to stop the highways was a monumental task, but not the end of the story.  Crockett documents the transformation of the Southwest Corridor over two decades into newly-aligned public transportation routes, an 8-mile long linear path connecting three neighborhoods, as well as more localized  resources ranging from community gardens to a community college.

I’ve been knowledgeable of a lot of details of the highway revolt in Boston for some time, and indeed I’ve lived adjacent to the still-evolving Southwest Corridor for 18 years.  Nevertheless, this book provided a lot of details and connections regarding the history of the movement that fascinate me.  Did you know that the Police Headquarters in Roxbury stands on land once used by the Black Panthers outreach trailer? The book is a vital work for anyone studying Boston history for learning how we got to we are now.  It is also an excellent work on community organizing, citizen-led planning, and the efficacy of popular democracy at its best.

Favorite Passages:

“For civil rights groups and militant Black organizations alike, the anti-highway fight served as an ideological accelerator for a politics that had evolved through voter registration drives, lunch counter sit-ins, and rallies protesting police brutality.  Honed in the North and the South, these tactics and their philosophical underpinnings now coalesced to yield a mature toolkit for battling state power and highways.” – p. 40

“More than fights for military withdrawal abroad and racial integration at home, these social movements called for a new democratic order recommitted to the fulfillment of citizen-defined needs.  Urban Planning Aid contributed to this activist agenda by bringing grassroots attention and leadership to the democratic use, development, and control of physical space.” – p. 71

“When I learned the survival story surrounding these records, I was struck by yet another type of antihighway activism: the efforts of antihighway actors themselves to save materials documenting their story.  Their attics, basements, personal address books introduced me to actions and actors that would have otherwise been virtually unknowable.” – p. 78

“And, significantly, local control, once a controversial political idea brandished by white southern segregationists, emerged as Black nationalist creed and multiracial, region-spanning resident response to absent and abusive government authority.”

Recommended books:

Rating: ****1/2

Book Review: Nothing More of this Land by Joseph Lee

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Author: Joseph Lee
Title: Nothing More of This Land: Community, Power, and the Search for Indigenous Identity
Narrator: Shaun Taylor-Corbett
Publication Info: Simon & Schuster Audio
Summary/Review:

Part memoir, part history, and part reflection on indigenous identity, Nothing More of This Land is a remarkable book.  Joseph Lee grew up spending summers at his extended family’s property in Aquinah, a Wampanoag community on the remote western edge of the island of Martha’s Vineyard, where his parents at time also operated a souvenir shop.  Martha’s Vineyard is known for Jaws, the Kennedy family, and a Presidential vacation spot, a place where property values are soaring as it becomes a playground for the East Coast elite.  Lee’s book documents how the Aquinah Wampanoag persevere and try to maintain community even when the majority of the people (like Lee) no longer reside on the island.  Lee also explores his own mixed identity which is a blend of Wampanoag, Japanese, and Chinese.  Lee expands this exploration by meeting with indigenous people not just in other North American communities but in South America and Oceania.  All in all, this feels like a very important book about what it means to be indigenous in the 21st century and how indigenous people can not just survive but thrive.

Rating: ****

Movie Review: Royal Shakespeare Company – Richard II (2013)

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Title: Royal Shakespeare Company – Richard II
Release Date: November 13, 2013
Director: Gregory Doran
Production Company: Royal Shakespeare Company
Main Cast:

  • Elliot Barnes-Worrell – Groom, Servant, Herald
  • Antony Byrne – Thomas Mowbray
  • Sean Chapman – Earl of Northumberland
  • Marty Cruickshank – Duchess of York
  • Oliver Ford Davies – Duke of York
  • Gracy Goldman – Lady-in-waiting
  • Marcus Griffiths – Greene
  • Emma Hamilton – The Queen
  • Jim Hooper – Bishop of Carlisle
  • Youssef Kerkour – Lord Willoughby
  • Jane Lapotaire – Duchess of Gloucester
  • Nigel Lindsay – Henry Bolingbroke
  • Jake Mann – Bagot
  • Sam Marks – Bushy
  • Miranda Nolan – Lady-in-waiting
  • Keith Osborn – Sir Stephen Scroop, Abbot of Westminster
  • Michael Pennington – John of Gaunt
  • Joshua Richards – Lord Ross, Captain, Keeper, Gardener
  • Oliver Rix – Duke of Aumerle
  • David Tennant – Richard II
  • Simon Thorp – Earl of Salisbury, Lord Marshal,
  • Edmund Wiseman – Harry Percy

Synopsis (via Letterboxd):

A monarch ordained by God to lead his people. But he is also a man of very human weakness. A man whose vanity threatens to divide the great houses of England and drag his people into a dynastic civil war that will last 100 years.

My Thoughts:

You can count on the Royal Shakespeare Company to go all out even on one of The Bard’s lesser known plays.  David Tennant stars at Richard, fresh off his first run on Doctor Who.  Tennant’s performance captures Richard’s haughtiness and youthful brashness.  Yet, in the second act he also makes the king’s downfall sympathetic while portraying Richard with great dignity as he submits to Bolingbroke.

Nigel Lindsay plays Bolingbroke as a more masculine and calculating character than Richard, but he also plays the character as someone who deposes the king because he has to, not so much because he takes delight in it.  Shakespeare wrote the characters in a way that he doesn’t really take sides, recognizing the strengths of each man and making them both somewhat unlikable.  A strong performance like this one helps bring out this nuance.

Other great performances include Oliver Ford Davies as a weary Duke of York and Marty Cruickshank as his wife.  In one surprisingly humorous scene, the Duke and Duchess simultaneously petition King Henry on opposite side of whether their son Aumerle should be pardoned.  This production changes Aumerle’s role in the play significantly.  Early on he is a close confidant to Richard (they even share a kiss), but at the end [SPOILER] it’s Aumerle who betrays and murders Richard.

Something that may sound pretty obvious is that a production of a Shakespeare work will have to deduce stage directions from the dialogue.  The choices made in this production can make for some interesting and sometimes humorous moments.  In one scene, a despondent Richard instructs his supporters to sit on the ground and after a moment of hesitation, they do.  The set is also a compelling design, with a long narrow thrust stage and projections on the back wall making it it look like a very long great hall or an endless forest.  A utilitarian bridge crosses the stage for the scenes where Richard, and later Henry, are “above” the audience.

Overall it’s a great interpretation that brings life and relevancy to a 400-year-old play and historic events from 600 years ago.

Rating: ***1/2

Book Review: Richard II by William Shakespeare

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Author: William Shakespeare
Title: Richard II
Publication Info: Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2011. [originally written in 1595]
Summary/Review:

Not that Shakespeare intended it this way, but reading his plays in chronological order makes this a prequel.  And really, the events of the Henry VI and Richard III plays make a lot more sense with this “origin story.”  Richard II is presented as a weak leader who vacillates and makes arbitrary decisions.  This is clear in the opening scenes where the king oversees the conflict between Henry Bolingbroke and Thomas Mowbry, each of whom declares the other a traitor.  Richard ultimately exiles both men, but Bolingbroke returns with an army and ultimately claims the throne himself as Henry IV.

Richard’s fall and Henry’s rise are depicted as parallel stories with all sorts of machinations and conspiracy.  Shakespeare also introduces a lot of characters who will be more significant in the Henry IV and Henry V plays, making this as confusing as cameos in the MCU for people who haven’t read the comics.  The way kings kept getting deposed in England makes the fact that absolute monarchy never really caught on there make a lot of sense. While this isn’t a particularly spectacular play for Shakespeare, I definitely sense growth in his writing style.

Rating: ***1/2