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Civil Rights Gone Wrong: Racial Nostalgia, Historical Memory, And The Boston Busing Crisis In Contemporary Children’S Literature, Lynnell L. Thomas

American Studies Faculty Publication Series

On May 14, 2014, three white Boston city councilors refused to vote to approve a resolution honoring the sixtieth anniversary of Brown v. the Board of Education because, as one remarked, “I didn’t want to get into a debate regarding forced busing in Boston.” Against the recent national proliferation of celebrations of civil rights milestones and legislation, the controversy surrounding the fortieth anniversary of the court decision that mandated busing to desegregate Boston public schools speaks volumes about the historical memory of Boston’s civil rights movement. Two highly acclaimed contemporary works of children’s literature set during or inspired by Boston’s …

New York Revisited (1992), Shaun O’Connell

New England Journal of Public Policy

The works discussed in this article include: City of the World: New York and Its People, by Bernie Bookbinder; New York, New York, by Oliver E. Allen; New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York City, from 1750 to the Beginnings of Our Own Time, by Thomas Bender; The Heart of the World, by Nik Cohn; The Art of the City: Views and Versions of New York, by Peter Conrad; After Henry, by Joan Didion; Literary New York: A History and Guide, by Susan Edmiston and Linda D. Cirino; Our …

Good-Bye To All That: The Rise And Demise Of Irish America (1993), Shaun O’Connell

New England Journal of Public Policy

The works discussed in this article include: The Rascal King: The Life and Times of James Michael Curley 1874-1958, by Jack Beatty; JFK: Reckless Youth, by Nigel Hamilton; Textures of Irish America, by Lawrence J. McCaffrey; and Militant and Triumphant: William Henry O'Connell and the Catholic Church in Boston, by James M. O'Toole.

Reprinted from New England Journal of Public Policy 9, no. 1 (1993), article 9.

Home And Away: Imagining Ireland Imagining America (2013), Shaun O’Connell

New England Journal of Public Policy

From the 2013 Editor's Note by Padraig O'Malley: Shaun O’Connell has lost none of his touch. In “Home and Away: Imagining Ireland Imagining America,” O’Connell juxtaposes two novels: Alice McDermott’s Charming Billy (1998) and Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn (2009) and reveals the parallels and contrasts that enrich the discussion of Irish and Irish American identities. Toibin, an Irish writer, would have us see an America, land of the free, as an open, inviting place but exacting in redeeming promises made; McDermott, an American writer, portrays an Ireland that is magical, a little bit of heaven, but finally a closed and bitter …

Home And Away: Imagining Ireland Imagining America, Shaun O'Connell

New England Journal of Public Policy

From the Editor's Note by Padraig O'Malley: Shaun O’Connell has lost none of his touch. In “Home and Away: Imagining Ireland Imagining America,” O’Connell juxtaposes two novels: Alice McDermott’s Charming Billy (1998) and Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn (2009) and reveals the parallels and contrasts that enrich the discussion of Irish and Irish American identities. Toibin, an Irish writer, would have us see an America, land of the free, as an open, inviting place but exacting in redeeming promises made; McDermott, an American writer, portrays an Ireland that is magical, a little bit of heaven, but finally a closed and bitter place. …

The Watermark: A Journal Of The Arts - Vol. 11 - 2003-2004, University Of Massachusetts Boston

The Watermark: A Journal of the Arts (1993-ongoing)

No abstract provided.

The Watermark: A Journal Of The Arts - Vol. 04 - 1996-1997, University Of Massachusetts Boston

The Watermark: A Journal of the Arts (1993-ongoing)

No abstract provided.

Good-Bye To All That: The Rise And Demise Of Irish America, Shaun O'Connell

New England Journal of Public Policy

The works discussed in this article include: The Rascal King: The Life and Times of James Michael Curley 1874-1958, by Jack Beatty; JFK: Reckless Youth, by Nigel Hamilton; Textures of Irish America, by Lawrence J. McCaffrey; and Militant and Triumphant: William Henry O'Connell and the Catholic Church in Boston, by James M. O'Toole.

The Father/Mother, Leonard Bushkoff

New England Journal of Public Policy

Leonard Bushkoff's "The Father/Mother" vignette, chronicling his move from "a smug Detroit suburb to mid-Cambridge shabbiness" as "the troubled sixties turned into the confusing seventies." The counterculture for most of us now exists only in the form of dim memories of a time when the promise of America lost its spiritual luster. That generation is now shaping our future, still groping for a beacon that will renew the promise, that would truly herald the progress of "a kinder, gentler nation."

The Happy Accident, Robert Manning

New England Journal of Public Policy

In "The Happy Accident," Robert Manning's delightful memoir of his early newspaper days in Binghamton, New York, we are brought back to an earlier and seemingly more innocent time when New England — and America — stood on the threshold of change. The moral of going home, it seems, is that as much changes, much never changes — something we should perhaps remember in these last feverish days of the nineteen eighties.

Originally From Dorchester: Arrivals And Departures In A Neighborhood, Kathleen Kilgore

New England Journal of Public Policy

In "Originally from Dorchester," her portrait of a neighborhood that wrestled — and continues to wrestle — with problems of race, ethnicity, cultural values, economic development, and mobility, Kathleen Kilgore captures the nuances of the small gesture, whether of defiance or gentility, that reveal the underside of social conflict more eloquently than databases or court findings. "The neighborhood," Kilgore writes, "weakened and aged, and forcibly resisted change." But it then began to adapt, the influx of the young and the upwardly mobile providing a lifeline that facilitated a process of renewal and accommodation, in which, in the best sense, diversity …

The Clouds: A Portrait Of One Family In Wartime Cambridge, Fanny Howe

New England Journal of Public Policy

The following is a portion of a work in progress, a biography of Mark DeWolfe and Helen Howe, two Bostonians born soon after the turn of the century. The book describes the adult years of this sister and brother, each of whom participated in American life at many levels important to the social and intellectual currents of the country. This section of the biography describes Cambridge in the World War II years.

My Life With The Fbi, James Carroll

New England Journal of Public Policy

When I was a child, the FBI was everywhere in my world and I loved my world more for that. My first remembered experience of entertainment — one could even say of story — was listening on the radio in the late forties to "The FBI in Peace and War," and I can still hum its theme. My older brother Joe and I, and then Brian, too, when he came along, huddled together by the old Philco, riveted because those tales of gangbusters, spy catchers, and G-men evoked the world of our father, who was himself an FBI agent. He …

Book Reviews: Divided Houses, Shaun O'Connell

New England Journal of Public Policy

These books are an odd lot, landscapes and structures of eccentric designs: (1) a collection of stories by Frank Conroy, his first book since Stop Time (1967). Where Stop Time was a detailed, narrative autobiography that read like fiction, Midair is an often generalized, fragmented fiction with obvious autobiographical implications; (2) the weird diary of Arthur Crew Inman, over 1,600 pages of his often vile obsessions, handsomely edited and curiously published by Harvard University Press; (3) a study of nuclear anxiety over five decades, in the form of a polemical novel, by Tim O'Brien; (4) a collection of poems, also …

Professor Richardson Et Al.: A New England Education, George V. Higgins

New England Journal of Public Policy

George V. Higgins contributes to the series on the New England state of mind, identifying "a New England code of acceptable behavior" whose hallmarks are discretion "and a sense of decency, still powerful enough to prompt even those flouting it, and getting caught, to feel a sense of guilt."