8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fills a real void, July 7, 2002
This review is from: Historical Atlas of Massachusetts (Hardcover)
If you're a native of this state, this book would be fantastic as a coffee table book, or as part of a library's reference collection. At more than 150 oversized pages, replete with full-color illustrations, it contains vastly more information than one might anticipate. But this doesn't mean the book is confusing -- far from it.
This atlas is organized into two primary sections. First, there is "The Historical Landscape," which focuses mainly upon more hard-nosed ways of viewing the human experience. By this I mean that it deals with political and economic power, and how they were manifested, both in the colonial period and as part of the United States. I hasten to add that this section starts out with a terrific set of maps about the native American presence in Massachusetts, prior to Verrazano, and prior to the Pilgrims. Maps show specifically where the most ancient native settlements were located, shortly after the Ice Age. Moving forward, they help us see how local tribal groups divided up the state territory; they show locations of native villages and footpaths; and detail interactions between tribes and early traders and explorers. The rest of this section breaks up the colonial period via a variety of helpful, cartographic means, such as the spread of towns across the state, and depictions of colonial Boston in various stages. Next, it deals with Massachusetts after the industrial and American revolutions. Demographic trends are helpfully depicted pictorially, such as Boston's burgeoning growth over the decades; the spread of railroads; and the growing number of wage-earners statewide.
The second section of this useful tome tends more toward the "soft sciences," although it is somewhat equivocally entitled "The Political and Social Landscape." This part of the atlas includes chapters giving cartographic presentations of "Women and Society," "Ethnicity and Race," "Health and the Social Order," and "Architecture and the Built Environment." Subsequent chapters in this section focus on technological developments, such as communications, transportation, and energy, and how these issues have affected Massachusetts demographics. The book ends with an interesting little chapter on the Quabbin Reservoir, and its environmental and social impact.
Don't miss the terrific bibliography, in the section near the end called "Sources." There is a helpful statistical appendix also, giving various figures for each town, going up to 1995. The 1995 figures were projected (this book came out in 1991).
One of my personal favorite maps in this book is on page 5, where the authors helpfully present a breakdown of the origins of Massachusetts town names. We see that most are named after English towns, while quite a few take their names from early Puritan or American settlers. Native American place names are fairly well represented in town names (Mattapoisett, Seekonk, Agawam, Scituate, etc.) as, of course, in the name of our state.
This book is not only useful, it's also fascinating and fun. I'd recommend it to anyone... I've reviewed a lot of books on Amazon.com, and because I usually review what I like, I tend to give a lot of stars. This one makes me wish I was more cautious in my awarding of stars, so my five star ranking of this great book would mean more.
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