| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Inventing the Charles River. By Karl Haglund. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003. xxii, 493 pp. $49.95, ISBN 0-262-08307-8.)

Karl Haglund has written an ambitious volume on the development of Boston's Charles River. A planner with the Metropolitan District Commission, Haglund brings great enthusiasm and planning expertise to his narrative of the lower Charles. He describes the evolution of the river from a private space bounded by toll bridges, tidal mills, and residences in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to a public space lined with parks and highways in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is this redefinition of the river, the "invention" of public space, that Haglund sees as the key to understanding the Charles River's development. Indeed, this reconception of the river is explanatory and important. Unfortunately, Haglund allows other questions to overwhelm his focus on public space and other urban planning problems to eclipse the history of the river. In the end, he is left with little room to explain the twentieth-century consequences of the nineteenth-century re-conception of the river. Meanwhile, Haglund's emphasis on highways reduces the Charles to a vista and a traffic obstacle.

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