What is Boston?

And how do we write it?

This image is featured on one of the history panels at the Ruggles T station. Our professor likes “YOUR GRANDMOTHER TRADED HERE” for the way it suggests both an appeal to tradition and a Southie insult saturated in innuendo.

 “For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.” — John Winthrop, A Model of Christian Charity

Winthrop delivered his sermon in 1630, before he and his colonizing congregation had even gotten off the boat. And so, people have been “writing Boston” since before the city was even founded.

While Winthrop wasn’t talking specifically about our fair city, Boston has often taken that idea of itself as a “city on a hill” quite seriously. 

It’s that self-seriousness that Elizabeth Hardwick meant to puncture when she wrote in a 1959 essay that “Boston — wrinkled, spindly-legged, depleted of nearly all her spiritual and cutaneous oils, provincial, self-esteeming — has gone on spending and spending her inflated bills of pure reputation, decade after decade.”

Hardwick was referring to the self-regarding old Boston Brahmin set, while ignoring the influx of Italian and Irish immigrants (not to mention its Black population). 

Despite Hardwick’s skeptical intervention, Boston has continued to spend its “bills of pure reputation” in popular culture and the public imagination.

Our group of 18 Northeastern University students (and one professor) will consider some of those representations over the next few months. We’ll respond to them here, even as we construct pictures of our own.

We’ve started already to compile a list of questions we’re interested in, and we’re eager to see where they take us.

A sampling:

• Who has the right to “write Boston”?

• If Boston is so liberal, why is it so segregated?

• Why are the restaurants so bad? (Counterpoint: Are they really so bad?) (Related: Why is everyone Dunkin’-pilled?)

• How does the local outlook on Boston conform to or differ from its national reputation?

• How do student life and housing impact the socioeconomic landscape of the city? Do our school’s national ambitions necessarily breed local resentment? Is Northeastern a Boston friend or foe?
  

Boston questions you’re pondering? Smash the button below and leave it in a comment!

We’d love for you to join us over the next two and a half months as we explore the Boston we live in and compare it to the one(s) we read about and watch on our screens, big and small.

Know someone who loves Boston? Or, if you’re in our class, know someone who loves you? Share this post with them and ask them to subscribe!