Time Periods: 19th Century

Forged By Fire – Chicago’s Industrial Growth Following the Great Fire

  Since the year 1871, the city of Chicago has never been the same.  The fire that shook the entire world ushered Chicago into a new era. Due to the city’s detailed face-lift in architecture and new industrial perspective, Chicago rose above the ashes to take its position in the United States as the golden […]

Boston Fire 1872

Clearly a fire that destroyed 60 acres and 800 buildings in a vibrant downtown of a illustrious city such as Boston was not the best thing ever. However, through my research of the Boston fire of 1872 and the aftermath it has become evident to me that there were certain silver linings to this disaster. […]

Boston Race Relations During the Antebellum Period

  Boston is known by many people as the city where the abolitionist movement in the United States was initiated, however the movement was truly started by the Quakers in Pennsylvania in 1775 with the creation of the first anti-slavery society.[1] Boston however was where the abolitionist movement was born in relation to the antebellum […]

Boston Sewers in relation to disease

This blog will give a brief overview about the history of Boston, Massachusetts sewer systems. We will began with the first evidence of sewer in the 1700s and quickly move up to Boston’s current systems. In the 1700s many settlers including some of the first second-generation Americans occupied Boston. Only the elite of the city […]

Italian Immigrants in Progressive Era Boston

Italian immigrants emigration to the United States affected Americans, especially in Boston. The racial and ethnic prejudices and discrimination by American and Bostonian society, was a factor in the Sacco-Vanzetti Case that proved monumental in Italian ethnic relations in the United States in the twentieth century. How the press handled and covered these Italian ethnic relations and the case was a major factor in the development of the racial and ethnic tensions at that time.

Sewers and Urban Planning in Boston

Though private citizens and companies built the early sewers of Boston the infrastructure was changed and expanded in the late 1800s with the development of the Metropolitan Sewerage Commission.