Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
You Can't Spell “Boston” Without “Snob”
I come from good old Boston,
The home of the bean and the cod,
Where the Lowells talk to the Cabots,
And the Cabots talk only to God.
—attributed to John Collins Bossidy and Samuel C. Bushnell, ca. 1905
And the accent! ... When a real Boston man used to approach me uttering
sounds like those of a brick-throated bullfrog it used to occur to me that if
the Cabots really had the ear of the Almighty, He must bitterly have regret-
ted that He ever invented the vocal organs of humanity.
—Ford Madox Ford,
Return to Yesterday
(1932)
As a family, the Bradlees had been around for close to three hundred years,
but well down the totem pole from the Lowells and the Cabots.
—Former
Washington Post
executive editor Ben Bradlee,
A Good Life
(1995)
The school system has yet to fully recover
from the traumatic experience of busing,
but every year it sends thousands of stu-
dents on to the institutions of higher
learning that continue to be Boston's
greatest claim to fame.
Those schools are also magnets for
international students, just one element
of the city's profound transformation in
the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Boston has largely shed its reputation for
insularity and become known as one of
the “most European” American cities.
High-tech businesses helped create a wor-
thy rival for Silicon Valley, and the gentri-
fication that emerged as early as the
1960s continues at high speed—the rap-
idly changing definition of what's a
“good” area of the South End is just one
indicator of the trend.
It's not all good restaurants and great
shopping, of course—for instance, the
Catholic Church's sex-abuse scandal came
to light in the Boston Archdiocese, a major
presence in this predominantly Catholic
area. But social divisions are fading. In
2003, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial
Court ruled that not allowing same-sex
couples to marry violated the state consti-
tution, institutionalizing an attitude that
had already taken hold outside the court-
room. The typical reaction to legal gay
marriage was, more or less, “What's the
big deal?” The election of Deval Patrick,
who in 2006 became the second African
American since Reconstruction (after Vir-
ginia's Douglas Wilder) elected governor,
inspired similar sentiments.
Thanks in no small part to the college
students who clog rapid transit and drive
property values out of sight—and who
stick around, keeping the cutting edge
nice and sharp—Boston continues to
grow and change. A time traveler from the
18th or even 17th century would still rec-
ognize small parts of the physical city. Its
attitude and spirit might be unfamiliar to
a visitor from as recently as 20 years ago.
3 Boston in Popular Culture: Books, Films, TV, & Music
A list of authors, screenwriters, and musi-
cians with ties to Boston could fill a book
of its own and only scratch the surface. To
get in the mood before visiting, let the
impulse that inspired you to make the trip
guide you. Here are some suggestions:
