eScholarship | Douglass Shand-Tucci
"Boston, city of thought and meditation."
- Le Corbusier, Quand les Cathedrales Etaient Blanches
The link to this months essay is http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/brahmin-dreams-in-search-of-the-capital-of-the-world/
"[To] publish original scholarly work on a dynamic research platform to scholars worldwide, the eScholarship program of the University of California was launched in 2001." It is the model for BBHs program, initiated in 2008 and inspired by the George Mason University Center for History and New Media blogs. The BBH program focuses on the work of BBH president Douglass Shand-Tucci and that of BBH Scholars and Forbes Fellows.
Although this site is not intended as a platform for reviews of work published on it (comments are closed) serious dialogue at backbayhistorical@gmail.com is invited especially from university students in courses linked to this site.
DS-Ts regular column, which appears monthly, is the latest iteration of his column for Christopher Lydon's WGBH Ten O'Clock News, which migrated thereafter from PBS to print in the 1990s in the Boston Phoenix and now appears here on the BBH site, of which DS-T is founder.
Always sourced but without the digital equivalent of footnotes, mid-text links, and never peer reviewed, this online work is intended to bridge academic and popular history, to encompass what Professor Mitchell Stephens (Daedalus, Spring 2010) calls "wisdom journalism", be elitist in its standards but populist in its outreach, and always rooted in Boston-Centric Global Studies.
Academics have for too long privileged field over place; yet the modern history of either Boston, Washington, New York or Los Angeles, America's intellectual, political, economic and entertainment capitals, cannot be written without reference to the other three.
Correcting this is one way this site seeks to reinvent "local" history in the case of the Boston city-state, the metropolis of city and suburbs long an Atlanticist capital, today as well a world economic power.
A pundit once claimed journalisms rule was simplify first, then exagerate. The rule here is to dramatize first, then study and clarify.
This column is addressed to a generation so transfixed with images as to be, in critic Clive James's words, "cut off from the mother ship of culture". The solution. No illustrations. Writes critic Camille Paglia: "the only antidote to the magic of images is the magic of words." Amen.