A People’s Guide to Greater Boston explores 170 or so sites in order to understand how our city came to be. Greater Boston's ruling classes have long seen the region as having an importance far beyond its borders: e.g. as a biblical “City on a Hill”; "the Athens of America"; and a birthplace of revolutions--from that which spawned the United States to that of the Internet. Beginning with sites ass
ociated with indigenous people and later struggles against colonial conquest, the Guide introduces the reader to a decidedly different city. It reveals movements for sovereignty, peace, abolition, universal suffrage, as well as experiments with industrial organization and economic democracy, from the 18th century to the present. The Guide brings the reader to Boston's many neighborhoods as well as to nearby municipalities - Concord, Lawrence, Salem, Quincy and others. In doing so, it unveils the workings of a city over a time and space illustrating how it has helped produce, and often contest, unjust power and inequality – nationally and globally. .
