Discusses the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center, a major state-level industrial policy effort in the Boston region.

Anger and frustration over Indigenous ethnic identity fraud have reached fever pitch across social and official media, within cultural and political institutions, and in Indigenous communities. It seems a day doesn’t pass without new revelations of people who have lied about and capitalized on Indigenous identity. Joy Harjo decried such “identity crimes,” saying that “Some claim identity by tenuous family story and some are perpetrating outright fraud.” These arguments go beyond simply outing individuals; increasingly, they call for publishers, universities, and other institutions to do a better job of verifying Indian identity claims. In doing so, however, many are pulling toward a problematic benchmark: enrollment in a federally recognized tribe. I respond to this with a reading of two urban intertribal newspapers – Los Angeles’ Talking Leaf and Boston’s The Circle – published before many tribes achieved their federal recognition. For Native nations that have experienced ethnocide, state detribalization, and rejection of their federal recognition claims, such newspapers have helped tribal members find each other, remember their histories and collectively imagine their futures

The chapter explores Lowell’s awareness of Boston’s complex class-marked topography. The Beacon Hill has become only a shorthand term for an anachronistically elite neighborhood, and we have become oblivious to the significance of its specific addresses. The Hill, however, was always intricately zoned and stratified, riven with class and ethnic conflict. Lowell’s story of his family moving from house to house within the Beacon Hill and then further and further east down the Back Bay is a dramatic story of social decline. The chapter also looks, in Lowell’s poetry and prose, for traces of the analogous class conflict over the downtown Boston’s public green spaces. The Lowells found themselves first “on the wrong side” of the Beacon Hill, then in the less prestigious section of the Back Bay impinged upon by the lesser castes. They enjoyed their leisure in the manicured Public Garden whose serenity was threatened by the messy, plebeian, enclosure-resisting Common.

Chinese can be found in most parts of the world. The signs in this chapter are mainly from the United States. A few are from Kyrgyzstan. Signs in the diaspora contexts are distinguished by the need to negotiate between Chinese and the local language(s), as Chinese is used to represent local contents. Both meaning-based translation and sound-based transliteration are used, as well as a combination of the two. Also notable are the dialectal elements. The language of the Chinese diaspora in North American is heavily Cantonese, as the earliest immigrants were from Cantonese speaking areas of China. Cantonese has also been adopted as sort of a lingua franca. Traditional characters are used as a rule, reflecting the dominance of traditional culture. The traditional vertical and right to left text orientation coexists with that of the modern horizontal and left to right format.

The short version of the history of nationalism and America’s mid-nineteenth-century civil war (1861–1865) may best be explained as a tale of two cities. Not, as one might suppose, the capitals of the Union and the Confederacy, Washington and Richmond, but two cities each of which was situated some four hundred miles from their warring sides’ respective capitals: Boston and Charleston. Arguably, it was in these cities that the essence of the national sentiments that motivated each side was most concentrated: in the case of the Union, to seek to maintain the federal compact and, in the case of the Confederacy, to destroy it. But this is also a story of alternative nationalist approaches. The Union and the Confederacy, respectively, inhabit what Christopher Wellman juxtaposes as the two camps of political theorizing on the subject of states, nations, and secession: the “statist” and the “nationalist.”

This chapter traces British American cities as distinctive political spaces that helped pioneer the concept of citizenship, a term that originally meant a city resident, and stood at the forefront of much of the political protest leading to the war for independence. However, from their inception, most American cities were subordinated to their provincial legislatures which were dominated by rural interests. Meanwhile the concept of citizenship came to be associated more with a set of actions rather than a place people lived. All the largest cities were occupied during the war, forcing residents to make difficult decisions and heightening the distrust leveled against them after the war. After the war, most urban residents remained minorities subordinated to the interests of mostly rural polities. Once the cradles of citizenship, most cities were not further empowered as polities by the American Revolution, but continued to be or were more sharply constrained by rural elites after the war concluded.

Amy Marcy Cheney Beach (1867–1944) was a musical prodigy whose professional career vacillated between piano performance and composition. Her professional debut was delayed until age sixteen because of parental misgivings, and then her performance career was curtailed at age eighteen when she married a prominent physician, Dr. H. H. A. Beach. His insistence that she devote her energies to composition rather than performance, along with his desire that she remain self-taught, inspired her to develop a unique late-Romantic compositional style. With the support of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and its musicians, she produced a Mass with orchestra, a symphony, a concerto, and numerous chamber works. Her trailblazing accomplishments included many firsts for American women composers. After the death of her husband and mother in 1910 and 1911, she reinvented herself as a virtuoso performer while still composing. Her compositional output is widely varied in genre, instrumentation, and musical style.

Samuel Clemenss changing views about phrenology and its purveyors did not occur in a vacuum. Here we see how he was not the first person or even the first American to use humor to poke fun at the doctrine or to “expose” how its purveyors operated in public venues. He was preceded by Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, a Boston physician whose widely disseminated criticisms of phrenology helped open his eyes to the head readers and influenced how he would lampoon them. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1809, Holmes received his Harvard undergraduate degree in 1829 and then attended a private medical school closely associated with Harvard. He proved to be an exceptionally bright student with a penchant for writing poetry and prose. He bore witness to how phrenology was the talk of the town when Spurzheim arrived in Boston in 1832. Many of his teachers were interested in phrenology and he joined them to hear Spurzheim. He also kept notes on Spurzheim’s autopsy and read about phrenology. But although he might have been skeptical about how much might be gleaned about the brain by studying skulls, he did not reveal what he was thinking while still a student in Boston.

Chapter 3 shifts the focus to the US East Coast. Roy Harris was one of several young Americans who studied composition in Paris with Nadia Boulanger in the 1920s; Symphony 1933 was his breakthrough work after returning home. Commissioned by Serge Koussevitzky, who anecdotally asked for a ‘big symphony from the West’, Symphony 1933 teases out the relationships between those expansionist discourses associated with the symphony indicated by Paul Bekker (1918), liberal ideology, and the imagined spaces of the American West. Examining the reception of Symphony 1933 and its music, the chapter raises questions about how the discourse around Harris’s symphony and liberalism’s spatial narratives colluded in establishing the political hegemony of white Americans and the supposed naturalness of their right to occupy the West, an acute anxiety given the disenfranchisement of white working-class Americans during the economic collapse of the early 1930s.

This chapter focuses on individual-level aspects of inclusion in entrepreneurial ecosystems, using examples from gender-focused ecosystems research in Boston, Massachusetts, as part of broader research carried out by the authors between 2014 and 2017. Using data from fieldwork carried out in Boston, we outline how individual-level gender biases operate in entrepreneurial ecosystems and how they impact women entrepreneurs differently than male entrepreneurs. Our focus is explicitly on the gendering of social capital and trust within entrepreneurial ecosystems, as we highlight their gendered dimensions which lead to exclusion for women, even if ‘unintentionally’.

This study examines syllable-final /s/ deletion in sociolinguistic interviews with sixty-two Spanish speakers. Twenty are residents of New York City and forty-two are residents of Boston. Previous research in these cities has documented intergenerational shifts in the use of a range of variable linguistic features. Two types of linguistic interaction – language contact and dialectal contact – have been suggested as catalysts for these shifts, resulting in use of Spanish that is both more English-like and less regionally differentiated. Though coda /s/ represents a potential site for convergence with English, as well as for dialectal leveling, the present analysis finds evidence of neither trend. Patterns of variation in /s/ are intergenerationally stable, both in terms of speakers’ rates of /s/ deletion and the set of linguistic and social factors that give rise to structured variability. The intergenerational persistence of dialectal differences in /s/ highlights the need to investigate contact outcomes on a feature-by-feature basis and cautions against the assumption that linguistic contact guarantees language change.

Until recently, Wallace Stevens’s oeuvre has gone largely neglected in studies of urbanism in literary modernism, as his verse mostly neglects the sweeping skylines often found in the poetry of more pronouncedly urban modernists. However, as seen in recent scholarship and as Daniel’s chapter demonstrates, Stevens was profoundly influenced by modern urbanization during his formative years in New York City and often turns to understated cityscapes as fit environments for his ongoing exploration of the right aesthetic relationship between reality and imagination. This chapter offers a brief study of Stevens’s urbanization of mind before providing a close reading of two major modes of urbanization throughout his works: a “dark,” antipoetic urbanization in which city architectures prevent contact with nature and community, thereby also preventing the creation of vibrant poetry, and an organic, aesthetic urbanization where cities are sites of poetic inspiration and surprising connection with the more-than-human world. Rather than resolving this tension, Daniel proposes that Stevens’s vacillation between these two modes is itself characteristic of the multiform and often ambivalent ways the poet engaged with modern urbanism.