All posts tagged with book-of-the-week

When whaling and fertilizer manufacturing ended in the latter half of the 19 century in the quaint village of Woods Hole, Massachusetts, the town turned to research, growing quickly into a world renowned center for marine science. In 1871, the U.S. Commission of Fish and Fisheries (the antecedent of the National Marine Fisheries Service), founded by the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution Spencer Fullerton Baird, published Report on the conditions of the sea fisheries of the south coast of New England.

At the turn of the 20th century, Boston saw a rapid increase in human settlement and industrialization which quickly transformed the once pristine Commonwealth into a highly developed, unsightly, and unhealthy metropolis. The movement to preserve what was left of Greater Boston’s natural wonders was inspired by the writings by transcendental thinkers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, who were advocates of the idea to “keep the New World new.” Local activists for the cause included Wilson Flagg, Elizur Wright, Sylvester Baxter, and Charles Eliot.