Few events can be said to have changed the face of Boston forever. Eventually destroying 775 buildings and causing millions of dollars in damage to the commercial section that we now know as Boston's business district, the Great Boston Fire of 1872 was a spectacular conflagration that destroyed "old Boston" and allowed a phoenix to arise from the ashes. This exciting new pictorial history brings to life the drama that began one Saturday evening in 1872 when a fire started in an empty hoop-skirt factory on the corner of Summer and Kingston Streets. At the time, Boston was in the throes of a epizootic disease that caused all horses in the area to be ill. This caused a virtual shutdown of transportation and city services and delayed the fire department's response to calls for help. By the time the breathless firemen arrived, the fire had already consumed the granite five-story factory and burst through the mansard roof, which acted as a flue and spread the fire. Within an hour, much of Summer Street was engulfed in flames and firemen from near and far were being summoned to combat the spread of the deadly blaze. By midnight, the fire had spread through Summer Street to Arch Street and was attacking Winthrop Square. Old Trinity Church, at the corner of Summer and Hawley Streets, had given itself up to the flames.

For two days in November, 1872, a massive fire swept through Boston, leaving the downtown in ruins and the population traumatized. Coming barely a year after the infamous Chicago fire, Boston’s inferno turned out to be one of the most expensive fires per acre in US history. Yet today few are aware of how close Boston came to destruction. Boston author Stephanie Schorow masterfully recounts the fire’s history from the foolish decisions that precipitated it to the heroics of firefighters who fought it. Lavishly illustrated with period artwork and photographs and published just before the fire’s 150th anniversary, The Great Boston Fire captures the drama of a life-and-death battle in the heart of the city.

The Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography is the first comprehensive encyclopedia of world photography up to the beginning of the twentieth century. It sets out to be the standard, definitive reference work on the subject for years to come. Its coverage is global – an important ‘first’ in that authorities from all over the world have contributed their expertise and scholarship towards making this a truly comprehensive publication. The Encyclopedia presents new and ground-breaking research alongside accounts of the major established figures in the nineteenth century arena. Coverage includes all the key people, processes, equipment, movements, styles, debates and groupings which helped photography develop from being ‘a solution in search of a problem’ when first invented, to the essential communication tool, creative medium, and recorder of everyday life which it had become by the dawn of the twentieth century. The sheer breadth of coverage in the 1200 essays makes the Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography an essential reference source for academics, students, researchers and libraries worldwide.

In 19th-century America, it was assumed that woman patients would be treated by male doctors. The idea of a "woman doctor" was deemed by many to lie somewhere between unfathomable and repugnant. Then along came Susan Dimock. A young North Carolinian who dreamed of becoming a physician, and grew up to practice medicine in Boston, Dimock was not the first American woman to battle the patriarchal medical establishment. But in the 1870s, she was arguably the best-educated, most-skilled woman surgeon in the nation as well as living proof that a woman could be competent, smart, lovely, and kind--all in the same package. Dimock's life reads like an adventure story, from recoiling at slave auctions and witnessing Civil War battles to escaping her fire-engulfed Southern hometown, then finding her place among Boston's most enterprising women. She studied medicine in Zurich and Vienna, hiked the Swiss Alps, executed complex surgeries, and trained America's first professional nurses, ultimately inspiring a new generation of female surgeons. It is no surprise that a prestigious Viennese medical professor, when asked for advice to aspiring young doctors, replied simply, "Make yourself to be like Miss Dimock." This biography is the first to give Susan Dimock her rightful place in medical, women's, and world history.

Examines America's experience with a wide range of quarantine practices over the past 400 years and the political, economic, immigration, and public health considerations that have prompted success or failure within the evolving role of public health. The novel strain of coronavirus that emerged in late 2019 and became a worldwide pandemic in 2020 is only one of more than 87 new or emerging pathogens discovered since 1980 that have posed a risk to public health. While many may consider quarantine an antiquated practice, it is often one of the only defenses against new and dangerous communicable diseases. Tracing the United States' quarantine practices through the colonial, postcolonial, and modern eras, Germs at Bay provides an eye-opening look at how quarantine has worked despite routine dismissal of its value. This book is for anyone seeking to understand the challenges of controlling the spread of COVID-19 and helps readers internalize the lessons learned from the pandemic. Few titles provide this level of primary source data on the United States' long reliance on quarantine practices and the political, social, and economic factors that have influenced them.

Seeking independence from her family in Brewer Street, Soho, London in 1858, Elizabeth Susanna Browning responds to an advertisement placed by 'Zeta' in The Times newspaper. Within days, Elizabeth is appointed housekeeper to 'Zeta', a strange but charismatic American engineer and newspaper editor, Zerah Colburn. Before long, 'Lizzy' as she is called by Mr. Colburn, and her new employer are sailing to New York on the iron steamer, Great Eastern. The couple marry in New York but a turbulent married life unfolds in Philadelphia where Zerah Colburn has launched a weekly newspaper. Hit by the 1860 financial crash, the newspaper folds and the couple head for London. In London, life is no happier for Lizzy who faces a personal and humiliating crisis. Faced with the diemma of staying with her husband or leaving, Lizzy hires a private enquiry agent, Mr. Bentley. What Mr. Bentley uncovers wounds Lizzy. But there are more shocks in store before she finds peace of mind with a new lover, another engineer, but from Norway.

A lively history of Boston’s emergence as a world-class city—home to the likes of Frederick Douglass and Alexander Graham Bell—by a beloved Bostonian historian “It’s been quite a while since I’ve read anything—fiction or nonfiction—so enthralling.”—Dennis Lehane, author of Mystic River and Shutter Island Once upon a time, “Boston Town” was an insulated New England township. But the community was destined for greatness. Between 1850 and 1900, Boston underwent a stunning metamorphosis to emerge as one of the world’s great metropolises—one that achieved national and international prominence in politics, medicine, education, science, social activism, literature, commerce, and transportation. Long before the frustrations of our modern era, in which the notion of accomplishing great things often appears overwhelming or even impossible, Boston distinguished itself in the last half of the nineteenth century by proving it could tackle and overcome the most arduous of challenges and obstacles with repeated—and often resounding—success, becoming a city of vision and daring. In A City So Grand, Stephen Puleo chronicles this remarkable period in Boston’s history, in his trademark page-turning style. Our journey begins with the ferocity of the abolitionist movement of the 1850s and ends with the glorious opening of America’s first subway station, in 1897. In between we witness the thirty-five-year engineering and city-planning feat of the Back Bay project, Boston’s explosion in size through immigration and annexation, the devastating Great Fire of 1872 and subsequent rebuilding of downtown, and Alexander Graham Bell’s first telephone utterance in 1876 from his lab at Exeter Place. These lively stories and many more paint an extraordinary portrait of a half century of progress, leadership, and influence that turned a New England town into a world-class city, giving us the Boston we know today.

Enter the private world of four New England bachelors, men who transformed their homes - now all public museums - into personal artistic statements. Exploring the lives of four bachelor designers, The Importance of Being Furnished: Four Bachelors at Home invites readers into the private worlds they created. Spanning the Gilded to the Jazz Age, these fascinating interiors not only reflect the intimate lives of their owners – men whose personal stories have, until now, remained in the shadows – but they serve as monuments to the Queer shaping of the American home as we know it today. Meet Charles Leonard Pendleton, (1846-1904), the reclusive gambler who built one of the greatest furniture collections of his age, all for a house ultimately built on sand. Explore the aristocratic interiors of renowned interior decorator Ogden Codman, Jr. (1863-1951), whose ancestral home served as a laboratory for his enormously successful 1897 manifesto, The Decoration of Houses, even as it transmitted his forebears’ vices. Join the literary salon of writer Charles H. Gibson, Jr. (1874-1954), who made his Boston home a monument to personal ambition and his own, once heralded beauty – all while transforming himself into a campy caricature of his own “Boston Brahmin” class. And last, fall under the spell of Henry Davis Sleeper (1878-1934), the nationally recognized decorator who created his fifty-room seaside masterpiece, Beauport, for the love of the man next door. Fully illustrated with color plates and period photographs, this book pays tribute to Oscar Wilde’s “gospel of beauty,” a cause these men promoted in a dazzling range of styles. By turns poignant, outrageous, and inspiring, the stories of these “surprisingly domestic bachelors” (as the press dubbed them) reveal the complicated depths beneath their homes’ brilliant surfaces.