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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.

Front Cover, A People’s Guide to Greater Boston.

Authors

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 (2021) 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.

About

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.

Blog

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Workmen’s Circle/Center for Jewish Culture and Social Justice [TEST ENTRY]

In the days leading to May Day 2017, the Immigrant Justice & Sanctuary Working Group of the Workmen’s Circle rallied its supporters in Brookline to stand for immigrant workers rights and advocate for Massachusetts to become a “sanctuary state” – a pro-immigrant bundle of policy initiatives. Explaining their support for measures, a Workmen’s Circle organizer declared, “Our history as Jews is the history of oppression and migration, but also of resistance… [It] is in our blood. From the creation of the Workmen’s Circle as a mutual aid society, to Hannah Szenes’s bravery rescuing Jews in World War II, we have resisted. This is my Jewish legacy.”

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DigBoston interview

https://digboston.com/interview-a-peoples-guide-to-greater-boston   DIG 22.32 – 8/13/20 INTERVIEW: A PEOPLE’S GUIDE TO GREATER BOSTON Written by MAX L. CHAPNICK Posted August 21, 2020 Filed Under: A+E, Books, Interviews Image courtesy of University of California Press “A People’s Guide to Greater Boston,” out now from the University of California Press, is a very readable text but one …

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The Boston Globe discusses “A People’s Guide to Greater Boston”

NEW ENGLAND LITERARY NEWS A radical roadmap, new medical memoir, and grants and fellowships awarded By Nina MacLaughlin Globe Correspondent,Updated July 3, 2020, 12:41 p.m. Radical roadmap “A People’s Guide to Greater Boston” (University of California) is not a glossy pit of tired tourist pap. It’s a history lesson with a point of view, shining …

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Contact

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