The City-State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power, 1630-1865

Description

A groundbreaking history of early America that shows how Boston built and sustained an independent city-state in New England before being folded into the United States In the vaunted annals of America's founding, Boston has long been held up as an exemplary "city upon a hill" and the "cradle of liberty" for an independent United States. Wresting

Mark Peterson is the Edmund S. Morgan Professor of History at Yale University. He is the author of The Price of Redemption: The Spiritual Economy of Puritan New England.

"Winner of the James P. Hanlan Book Prize, New England Historical Association" "[A] richly detailed history." * New Yorker * "An original and provocative take. . . . [The City State of Boston is] ambitious, fluid and worldly."---Alex Beam, Wall Street Journal "Peterson leads us through [Boston's] Enlightenment ideals and how they clashed with the city's links to the American South's slave-driven economy. A meaty, methodical exploration of a crucial American founding stronghold." * Kirkus * "An immense, fresh history of the 'city upon a hill' conceives of the place as an independent city-state that was absorbed into the new country that arose around it. Boston's current moment-at once privileged and peculiar-suggests the value of considering its distinctive past in light of powerful, imaginative scholarship, in the deft hands of the author, now at Yale." * Harvard Magazine * "Remarkable. . . . [A] fresh and original interpretation of colonial New England engagement with what are, in the end, fundamentally moral questions. The City-State of Boston is an engaging blend of small change and big ideas."---John Turner, Patheos "The most detailed and entertaining history of Boston that's been written so far."---Steve Donoghue, Christian Science Monitor "The City State of Boston is a is an ambitious work based on prodigious research. It provides a richly detailed narrative and includes an enormous cast of characters, some of whom will be familiar to readers, though many will not."---Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Times Literary Supplement "Mark Peterson's long-awaited The City-State of Boston presents a breath-taking thesis: Boston's history from its first English settlement through the American Civil War ought to be understood as the rise and fall of an independent city-state. . . . Peterson's description of the Constitution of the United States is startling."---Mark Valeri, William and Mary Quarterly "The City-State of Boston will be a landmark in the literature. . . . [It's a] powerful and compelling story."---John L. Brooke, Journal of the Early Republic