Topic: World History
Historical topics entirely outside of Boston and/or Massachusetts, topics that affect communities outside of the United States, topics that primarily effect U.S. States other than Massachusetts
Boston’s rapid development in the seventeenth century would not have been possible without the labor of enslaved Africans, which allowed the construction of an integrated political economy linked primarily to markets of the West Indies. Boston served as a center of the slave trade and port of entry for enslaved Africans. By the early 1700s, the New England Colonies were deeply involved in an economic alliance with the sugar-producing West Indies, driven by the abduction and enslavement of Africans and the trade of raw materials, molasses, and rum.
Urban renewal in Cairo, the capital of Egypt, over the past few decades has prioritized “slum clearance” with uneven results, and failed to ensure affordable housing for all of the city’s poor. Comparing urban renewal in Cairo to the West End suggests shared global challenges for urban redevelopment which remain with us today.
At New York’s 1939-40 World’s Fair, a young man from the West End presented the Chemical Man, a working model of the human digestive system.
The West End branch of the Land League made political and financial contributions to the original Land League in Ireland, an organization of tenant farmers and Irish nationalists that resisted high rents and evictions in the 1880s.
Far from their country of origin, Ukrainian immigrants and their descendants in the West End maintained connections and advocated for justice in their mother country.
Don Pedro Gilbert, a nineteenth-century Spanish pirate who raided merchant ships in the Atlantic, was executed by hanging, in 1835, at the Leverett Street Jail in the West End. The West End Museum resides approximately where the Jail stood.
Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann created modern Paris through ambitious urban renewal projects over almost 20 years (1853-1871), but he displaced thousands of working-class Parisians through demolition and slum clearance.
