A People's Guide to Greater Boston

We launch this site just as our city and country again find the opportunity for an honest reckoning with its past. In sharing stories of Bostonians who challenged their oppression and exploitation, we hope to contribute to present conversations. As readers will discover, our forebears were hardly silent or passive, instead, they took on the powerful, setting out their grievances and often proposing alternatives. As such, their voices must be added to current dialogues and debates. More than merely promoting a book, this website will call attention to the struggles and issues raised by it. 

A People’s Guide to Greater Boston is available for purchase from BookShop.org, the University of California Press, Google Books, and Amazon.

Joseph Nevins was born and raised in Dorchester and is Professor of Geography at Vassar College. His books include A Not-So-Distant Horror: Mass Violence in East Timor; Dying to Live: A Story of U.S. Immigration in an Age of Global Apartheid; and Operation Gatekeeper and Beyond: The War on “Illegals” and the Remaking of the US-Mexico Boundary.

Suren Moodliar lives in Chelsea. He is a coordinator of encuentro5, a movement-building space in Boston, and editor of the journal Socialism and Democracy. He co-edited Noam Chomsky’s Internationalism or Extinction (2020), Turnout! Mobilizing Voters in an Emergency (July 2020) with Matt Nelson and Charlie Derber, and coauthored Chomsky for Activists (forthcoming, 2020) with Paul Shannon and Charlie Derber.

Eleni Macrakis grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and now works in the field of affordable housing development in the Greater Boston area. She holds a Master in Urban Planning from Harvard University.

Please visit the acknowledgments page for more insight into the manifold and diverse contributions empowering this project.

A “people’s guide” is necessarily an unending project. The book is but one intervention into the historical dramas that are playing out in our lands. It offers neither the first nor the last words. This website is one forum to continue the conversation, a place to reflect on the book’s stories, rethink the narratives, and enrich the movements that the book celebrates.

On this website, we will feature some of the sites described in the book, add new ones, and think about candidates for an expanded “People’s Guide to Greater Boston.” As such, it does not replace the book (yes, please buy or borrow a copy), but it furthers the book and its strategy of telling stories about particular places in order to introduce or better understand the movements they engendered.

We will also use the site to plan new projects, announce and detail our walking tours, and provide commentary on current topics before our city. As such, it is also a place for dialogue with the authors and other contributors to the conversations.

Please contact the authors via info >at< bostonbook [dot] org