Boston has long been known as the Hub of the Universe, but it’s also a hub of world class arts institutions. One of those institutions is the Boston Symphony Orchestra. This week, we’re looking at the founding of the BSO and the construction of its iconic home, Symphony Hall. We’ll discuss the characters that brought the BSO and Symphony Hall to life, as well as the remarkable features of the concert hall, known for its near-perfect acoustics.
Founding the BSO
- Read Symphony Hall’s nomination as a National Historic Landmark and check out the excellent black and white photos that accompanied it.
- The Methuen Memorial Music Hall, where the original organ from the Boston Music Hall lives now.
- An 1852 article about the opening of the Boston Music Hall.
Boston Book Club
You may recall Michael Patrick MacDonald from our previous Boston Book Club selection, All Souls. A native of South Boston’s Old Colony housing project, MacDonald wrote candidly about the crime, violence, drugs, and poverty that plagued a community that was simultaneously tight-knit and protective of his own.
Michael Patrick MacDonald’s second volume of memoir, called Easter Rising, follows a very different pattern. Here’s how MacDonald’s website describes the book:
In Easter Rising Michael Patrick MacDonald tells the story of how he escaped Old Colony housing project, and learned to live again. Desperate to avoid the “normal” life of crime and drugs that surrounds him, Michael crosses the bridge into the bigger world and reinvents himself in the burgeoning punk rock movement downtown. At nineteen MacDonald escapes further, to Paris and then London. Out of money, he contacts his Irish immigrant grandfather — who offers a loan after securing a promise that Michael will visit Ireland. It is this reluctant journey “home” that reconciles MacDonald with his neighborhood, his family, and his heritage — and the real way forward. A roots journey laced with both rebellion and profound redemption.
Though All Souls is now part of the BPS reading curriculum, Jake and Nikki prefer Easter Rising. An insightful review on GoodReads describes the connection between the two memoirs:
Michael Patrick MacDonald’s All Souls: A Family Story from Southie told the story of the loss of four of his siblings to the violence, poverty, and gangsterism of Boston’s Irish American ghetto. The question “How did you get out?” has haunted MacDonald ever since. In response he has written this new book, a searingly honest story of reinvention that begins with young MacDonald’s breakaway from the soul-crushing walls of Southie’s Old Colony housing project and ends with two healing journeys to Ireland that are unlike anything in Irish American literature.
The story begins with MacDonald’s first urgent forays outside Southie, into Boston and eventually to New York’s East Village, where he becomes part of the club scene swirling around Johnny Rotten, Mission of Burma, the Clash, and other groups. MacDonald’s one-of-a-kind 1980s social history gives us a powerful glimpse of what punk music is for him: a lifesaving form of subversion and self-education. But family tragedies draw him home again, where trauma and guilt lead to an emotional collapse. In a harrowing yet hilarious scene of self-discovery, MacDonald meets his father for the first time — much too late. After this spectacularly failed attempt to connect, MacDonald travels to Ireland, first as an alienated young man who has learned to hate shamrocks with a passion, and then on a second trip with his extraordinary “Ma,” a roots journey laced with both rebellion and profound redemption.
Upcoming Event
Rebecca Byrd of UNC Charlotte is presenting a brown bag lunch event at Massachusetts Historical Society brown bag lunch event on Wednesday June 26 at noon. The topic will be Susie King Taylor: A Legacy of Black Womanhood and Historic Preservation. Taylor was the first Black Army nurse, and she tended to an all Black army troop named the 1st South Carolina Volunteers and later redesignated the 33rd United States Colored Infantry Regiment, where her husband served for four years during the Civil War. Despite her service, like many Black nurses, she was never paid for her work. As the author of Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33rd United States Colored Troops, Late 1st S.C. Volunteers, she was the only Black woman to publish a memoir of her wartime experiences. She was also the first Black person to teach openly in a school for formerly enslaved people in Georgia.
Susie King Taylor was not Sojourner Truth or Harriet Tubman. Although she does not have the notoriety of those two women, her story is no less important. As the first African American army nurse who traveled with the First South Carolina Volunteers during the Civil War, an educator for freed people, and founder of the Women’s Relief Corps., Ms. Taylor is truly a remarkable woman. Although she remains in an unmarked grave, a younger historian has been tasked to preserve her legacy into the digital age.Brown Bag Lunch Programs allow MHS research fellows to present and discuss their work. Programs are free and open to the public–pack a lunch and join us, no RSVP required.