Harvard University Press Blog

The Boston Massacre: A Usable Past

A little after 9:00 p.m. on March 5, 1770, a detachment of British soldiers fired into a crowd of townspeople on King Street in Boston, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The result—the “Boston Massacre”—is perhaps the most densely described incident in early American history, yet, as historian Eric Hinderaker shows in his comprehensive new study, the descriptions are sufficiently contradictory to make the unfolding sequence of events surprisingly hard to pin down. “To say what happened would seem to be a straightforward task,” he writes, “but in many ways the Boston Massacre remains an irreducible mystery.”

For Hinderaker, the Boston Massacre offers an unusual opportunity to observe how flashes of memory and bits of belief gradually take on the shape of competing narratives, and then to trace the evolution of those narratives across a long span of time. To that end, in Boston’s Massacre Hinderaker unravels the accounts of the attack—which was witnessed by more than two hundred people—and describes the political and cultural issues roiling Boston that day. He traces the competing narratives that contributed to contemporary understandings of the event, and, finally, the evolving memories of the attack as it’s been invoked in later years.

That last thread of Hinderaker’s study—various episodes illustrating the usefulness of the Boston Massacre as a touchstone of American identity—really helps to fortify our understanding of the workings of public memory. After detailing the many rhetorical uses of the Massacre throughout the Revolutionary period—for a modern reenactment, think of the tossed off interrogatory “And what about Boston?” during the “Farmer Refuted” number of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton—Hinderaker shows how Boston’s newly-independent leaders sought to downplay the attack, regarding the March 5 rioters as a lawless rabble unworthy of commemoration.

But then Boston’s African American community brought it back, making Crispus Attucks a familiar name at the same time that the moral depravity of slavery was becoming an urgent public issue:

Beginning around 1840, black activists laid claim to Crispus Attucks as an African American patriot who was the first man to die for the cause of American independence. William Cooper Nell was Attucks’s foremost champion. An African American who grew up in Boston, Nell was an abolitionist, a printer who trained under William Lloyd Garrison, and a historian. In a series of newspaper essays and books that appeared in the 1840s and 1850s, Nell introduced Attucks to his readers, which included the community of Boston abolitionists and black activists.

Ironically, Nell learned most of what he knew about Attucks from an Italian historian. Carlo (or, as his American publishers would have it, Charles) Botta’s three-volume history of the American war for independence was first translated into English in 1820; it quickly achieved great popularity, passing through seven editions in fifteen years. Botta relied heavily upon The Trial of William Wemms for his account of the Boston Massacre. But Botta focused on a feature of the trial that Ramsay had passed over: he made Crispus Attucks the central figure in the night’s events. Botta described rioters furiously attacking the Custom House sentinel. When Preston’s men marched to his relief, “they encountered a band of the populace, led by a mulatto named Attucks.” As the violence and confusion escalated, “the mulatto and twelve of his companions, pressing forward,” surrounded the soldiers and urged the townspeople not to be afraid. “The mulatto lifted his arm against captain Preston, and having turned one of the muskets, he seized the bayonet with his left hand.” The musket was discharged, and Attucks was the first man killed. Among the dozens of eyewitnesses who offered a version of these events, only Oliver Wendell’s slave, Andrew, had remembered them this way. But John Adams chose to amplify Andrew’s account in his closing arguments to protect the reputation of Boston, and now Botta, in search of dramatic interest, made Attucks the central figure in his narrative.

William Cooper Nell saw in Crispus Attucks something other than the outlandish figure that Adams had intended to make of him. For Nell and other black activists of the 1840s, Attucks became a patriot forebear. In 1851 Nell and six other African Americans from Boston petitioned the state legislature to appropriate funds for a monument to Crispus Attucks, “the first martyr of the American Revolution.” From that point forward, the question of whether the Boston Massacre would be publicly remembered was bound up with the status of Crispus Attucks as a symbol of African American citizenship.

As Hinderaker details, the movement to memorialize Attucks became locally controversial, but in the following decades Attucks became an increasingly important figure to black communities around the nation.

"The Boston Phoenix Made Me"

The abrupt shuttering of the Boston Phoenix earlier this month left HUP Executive Editor for the Humanities Lindsay Waters reflecting on the many great writers he came to know during the paper’s glory days. One in particular whom Waters remembers discovering in the Phoenix is Howard Hampton, a collection of whose writings we published in 2007 as Born in Flames: Termite Dreams, Dialectical Fairy Tales, and Pop Apocalypses. “I was hungry for what Howard might be writing in the Phoenix,” Waters says, “because it was in the pages of the Phoenix, the Twin Cities’ City Pages, the old Voice, and the LA Weekly that the spirit of combative aesthetic critical writing had migrated once a repressive super-professional industrial strength writing had killed most criticism in the academy. What I loved persisted in the writings of Frank Kermode and Tony Tanner and Greil Marcus and Bob Christgau and Pauline Kael, whom I had the great and stinging pleasure of visiting with Howard in 1999 at her home in Great Barrington, Mass. It took me some time to get Howard to pull his writings together, but when we did it made for a book that is a real doozie, one of the ones I love the most.”

Below, Howard Hampton himself looks back on his formative early days writing for the Phoenix.

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I have always been partial to the title of an early Graham Greene novel (later a film): England Made Me. That’s how I felt about a certain recently deceased alternative newspaper—The Boston Phoenix made me.

In January 1982, I received a manila envelope containing a few copies of the weekly’s Arts Section along with a short invitation from their Music (soon to be Arts) Editor Kit Rachlis. By then, his music section (along with Robert Christgau’s at the Village Voice) had displaced Rolling Stone and Creem as the major leagues of rock criticism. I was an unemployed college dropout who had never written a word professionally, but Greil Marcus had forwarded Rachlis a long, opinionated, obsessive letter of mine. Intrigued, he invited me to join the ongoing conversation amongst the twenty-odd writers who covered music for the paper.

Joyce Millman has written a lovely evocation of that era at the Phoenix. What I remember most vividly was the process of getting a piece into shape. Kit was a superb and utterly meticulous editor: we went over every piece line by line on the phone (I live on the other side of the country), and the writer had to be able to justify every comma, every claim, every flight of fancy/nonsense. It was sobering and bracing—Kit gave you a sense your writing mattered, but that to do anything less than full justice to the record at hand was to betray not only the music you loved but yourself as well.

My first feature assignment was a review of Laurie Anderson’s debut album Big Science. Kit pronounced the piece dead on arrival and went through it like a patient coroner, taking me through every lifeless abstraction and stiff locution. I whined one passage was perfectly valid in the stuck-up vein of a now-forgotten mid-level scribe at the Voice; “You’re better than him,” he shot back, and that was that.

I rewrote the review, and as I was doing so, the landscape shifted as well: Lester Bangs died and Greil Marcus published “The Long Walk of the Situationist International.” (If memory serves, the Bangs obits and the Voice Literary Supplement with “Walk” were bundled in the same issue.) I wrote (or at least felt) like Dorothy abandoned in Alphaville, or Lemmy Caution stranded in Oz. (I guess that made Laurie Anderson… Anna Karina.) The piece established a beachhead for me. The Phoenix offered the opportunity to write about everyone from John Berger to Cyndi Lauper—there was a lot of open space there. I bonded with the wonderful Phoenix critic Mark Moses over our boundless love for Tapper Zukie’s Man Ah Warrior and our disdain for the gas-baggage that increasingly attached itself to music like barnacles on the Titanic.

Mark’s death in 1989 was, to my mind, the end of the paper: music editor Milo Miles (Kit’s excellent successor) had been sacked, and it was left to his unctuous replacement to eulogize Mark, a writer whose values (and compatriots) he swept away with the vacuous impunity of a robotic broom. Later, the regime changed again and the paper rebounded, but it never mattered to me; what was done was done. The Phoenix had nurtured the rock dreams of a bygone era: such stuff as Ray Davies and Alex Chilton songs were made of.

"The Sea Was Not Immortal"

From W. Jeffrey Bolster’s The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail, new this month:

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For centuries, from Cape Cod to Newfoundland the return of fish, birds, and marine mammals—each in their season—sparked quiet rejoicing in fishing towns and outport villages. Many of those communities had few economic alternatives to harvesting the sea, and fishing folk chose to believe that the sea would provide forever. That belief dovetailed with the attitude of naturalists and scientists, who often insisted, at least until the mid-twentieth century, that the sea was eternal and unchanging, even though almost every generation of harvesters noted evidence to the contrary and raised disturbing questions about the perpetuity of the stocks on which they relied. Beginning in the nineteenth century, however, fishermen’s hard-won knowledge all too often disappeared as new technologies increased catches. Bumper catches obliterated memories of how the same number of men, with the same gear, fishing in the same place, had been catching fewer fish as time passed—an indicator that stocks were diminishing. Shoreside naturalists’ insistence that the sea was eternal and fishermen’s periodic loss of vernacular knowledge that stocks were declining reinforced each other. Combined, they camouflaged one of the northwest Atlantic’s great untold sea stories, a true tale of changes in the sea.

An irony sharp as a sculpin’s spines pervades that story. No profession has ever placed more emphasis on avoiding disaster than seafaring. Mariners instinctively anticipated danger, maintained a sharp lookout, and constantly scanned their surroundings for indication of the slightest problem. To relax vigilance was to court catastrophe. Yet disaster struck for both fish and fishermen, periodically in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, then universally at the end of the twentieth century, in part because neither fishers nor scientists nor policymakers chose to believe that what they were seeing was happening. The sea was not immortal.

 

Housing and Mental Illness

The post below comes from Russell K. Schutt, co-author with Stephen M. Goldfinger of the recently published Homelessness, Housing, and Mental Illness.

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A recent New York Times article examined the tragic and brutal murder of the group home counselor Stephanie Moulton by Deshawn James Chappell, a group home resident diagnosed with schizophrenia. The circumstances of the murder force our attention to two questions: What is schizophrenia? And what are the prospects for community integration of persons with schizophrenia? We need look no further than the comments elicited by the NYT article to realize the extent of controversy about these questions. But what does scientific research actually show about these issues?

Schizophrenia is a serious mental illness, the causes of which are not yet well understood. It afflicts about 1% of the population, typically emerging in late adolescence or early adulthood. Neuroimaging and functional testing identify diminished brain volume in key areas and declining cognitive and social functioning at the time that symptoms of the disease emerge. After onset, the symptoms persist, although their intensity fluctuates and some long-term research has identified patients in whom symptoms have dissipated many years after onset. Psychotropic drugs relieve symptoms such as hallucinations and paranoid delusions for some patients, but they have no effect on cognitive or social functioning.

Debates over the prospects for community integration of persons with schizophrenia have framed mental health service policies since the 19th century. The first state psychiatric hospitals were designed to provide a protected, humane environment for persons with serious mental illness. Without much quality evidence, state hospital superintendents in the 19th century issued glowing reports about patient improvement. Even still, the hospitals were soon overwhelmed by a rapidly increasing patient census, inadequate resources, and a shift in professional psychiatrists’ focus to private patients. Exposés in the 20th century suggested that the environment of state hospitals was more likely to exacerbate patients’ symptoms and diminish their prospects for return to the community than to restore their health.

The proponents of deinstitutionalization sought to end the warehousing of persons with serious mental illness and to instead provide community-based care that would normalize treatment services and facilitate community engagement. They were motivated as well by the discovery of psychotropic medications that lessened symptoms; state governments’ desire to shift costs to Medicaid-reimbursable community-based care; and the growing demands of advocacy groups for patients’ right to make their own treatment decisions.

Whatever the precise mixture of commendable and crass motives, the goals of deinstitutionalization were only partially achieved. State hospitals were indeed depopulated, but alternative community-based care was only partially funded and psychotropic medications proved to be only partially effective. In addition, rising housing costs and the widespread destruction of cheap single room occupancy hotels made it impossible for many persons with serious mental illness to maintain any type of community residence. The large number of people with serious mental illnesses who became homeless or were incarcerated indicates the failures of this new service system.

In Praise of Design, Regional Edition

As publishers, we keep company in various overlapping circles of the book business. One community with which we’ve had a long relationship is the Bookbuilders of Boston organization, which brings together people involved in book publishing and manufacturing throughout New England. Last night the group held its 54th annual New England Book Show, at which we were thrilled to see a number of our books recognized for their excellence in design and production.

In the category of illustrated general trade books, our annotated edition of Pride and Prejudice, and the relaunched Image of the Black in Western Art series were both highlighted for their overall design and production, from jacket to layout:

In the reference category, The Classical Tradition got a nod for its overall design:

 

The following were all recognized as outstanding jackets in the general trade category, including a “best in category” award to our old sheepish pal:

 

HUP Display Room, 1966

The HUP Display Room as it looked in 1966:

The Display Room, located in the Holyoke Center arcade in the heart of Harvard Square, closed on June 17 of this year. More on the display room plus a few more photos from Harvard Magazine.

Out of Town News, resuscitated

News just in that Harvard Square landmark Out of Town News will in fact not be closing, as an outfit called Muckey's Corp., which runs newsstands in the Boston area, has signed a five-year lease to operate the venerable newsstand located on the pedestrian island in Harvard Square (home also to the subway entrance once known affectionately as "the pit").

CELTICS WIN

Congrats! Maybe it's time to add a chapter on this year's NBA champs to The Rock, the Curse, and the Hub: A Random History of Boston Sports, a collection of original essays that celebrates the players, the games, and the arenas that are at the heart of the city of Boston.