I received my first email question today, after having been live on this site for four days. (n.b. The posts in the archive from prior months were backdated after being transferred from my previous blog host--when one uses "facts of the day" it is best to try to keep them chronologically correct). A reader asked for some help with a term paper they are writing about Boston's history and wanted some general information about the annexation of Dorchester and Roxbury.
I'm not sure that sending an email to someone who writes a blog on the internet (or internets, if you will, the source of all those "rumors") is the best way to get accurate information. Hasn't everyone (and by everyone I mean the eighty-seven people who actually care about these things) heard of the recent spate of professors who have had to admit that parts of the books they "wrote" were actually plagiarized by graduate assistants doing research for them? While the issue of authorship called into question by these occurences is an interesting one (can one write a book as an assembly line process?) we'll have to save that for another blog.
I'm enough of a control freak that I choose to do my research
myself. Besides, my eighteen month old, as smart as she is, still
can't create footnotes in the approved Chicago Manual style. MLA
style, she can handle, but that is yet another issue. Am I the only
one who finds that the MLA in-text parenthetical citation style is like throwing roadblocks into one's writing?
Discerning readers will notice that I occasionally cite references for my posts. Ah, but what about the rest of what I write, you ask. The short answer is that I make it up. I read books, assess, condense, consider, and finally write. This act of synthesis is what separates writing from the mere cataloging and collecting of facts. Does anybody write the phone book? Nope. Perhaps the most important part of the writing is the assessing of the sources, which often disagree. This isn't to say that I don't catalog and collect as well: the posts on Boston laws are good examples, or the weather entries. However, I generally try to connect posts in those categories to larger issues--they are the tips of icebergs.
Boston is fortunate to have several libraries--public, academic, and private--which hold most of the answers to most of the questions one could ask about Boston. Notice that I didn't say Border's, which seems to functioning as a de facto research library for many folks these days. If I were going to do research on Boston's history, there are a few places I would start. First, the research wing of the Boston Public Library in Copley Square should be the first stop for anyone looking to do general research on Boston, especially for their collection of newspapers on microfilm. Second, The Bostonian Society library (which charges a fee for non-members to use the library) has an excellent collection of Boston materials, especially city directories, images, and other non-book research material. As I have noted in another post, many of their images can be found online. They also have a copy of my M.A. Thesis and a book I donated to their collection. (A special Boston related prize to anyone who can find and email me the name of the book.) Third, the Boston Athenaeum, a private library on Beacon Hill, has strong holdings in 19th century Boston materials. The Athenaeum was founded in 1807, well before the Boston Public Library, so it has some of the more obscure ephemera--pamphlets, broadsides, etc--items which generally disappear quickly. The Athenaeum allows visiting scholars to do research using their collections--you just have to ask nicely and make an appointment. I'm a member of the Athenaeum and believe there are few better places to do research in the United States. You can also browse their online catalog.
Finally, I rely on my own research library, which I've collected over the past fifteen years. I don't think I have anything that the aforementioned institutions don't already have, so no need to ask if you can come over. I am willing to talk Boston history over dinner or via a speaking engagement however. If you're not willing to spring for dinner, I can be enticed to answer questions in the blog if they pertain to subjects I know something about. Email me. Just don't ask me to help write your term paper. And to answer the question that started this post, the questioner is directed to Sam Bass Warner Jr.'s Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870-1900.
And for those of you who want to learn a little more about historians, and the black art of writing history, I refer you to Peter Novick's That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession.
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