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South Boston: My Home Town, The History of an Ethnic Neighborhood. New Edition. By Thomas H. O'Connor. (Northeastern University Press, 360 Huntington Ave., Boston, MA 02115, 1994), $14.95 in paperback.
In 1994, Thomas O'Connor's South Boston: My Home Town was reissued as a new paper edition. The revision mainly consisted of a new preface and an enlarged bibliography to update the original work published in 1988.
O'Connor, in the most personal of his many books on Boston, surveys the history of South Boston from the colonial period through the 1990's, although the period after 1850 is stressed. He traces the early development of the peninsula first known as MaRak, then Dorchester Neck, and finally South Boston. The community was annexed to Boston in 1804. O'Connor argues that the residents of the isolated peninsula, even in the early nineteenth century, had resentment against the older sections of Boston and a sense of "us against them."
Beginning in the 1830's, Irish immigrants began to enter South Boston's poorer sections. They chose the district mainly for economic reasons. Men could work in the burgeoning industries of the area or on the nearby docks. Women could make the short trip over the Fort Point Channel...