| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Gaining Ground: A History of Landmaking in Boston. By Nancy S. Seasholes. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003. xvi, 533 pp. $49.95, ISBN 0-262-19494-5.)

Roughly three-fourths of central Boston is made land (not landfill, an obvious oxymoron). Nancy S. Seasholes has done an extraordinary job of tracking not just big projects such as the well-known Back Bay and still bigger subsequent projects but the slow, piecemeal extension of much of the city's shoreline from the original peninsula. Her research covers 350 years in meticulous detail, utilizing such diverse sources as maps, manuscript collections, archaeological digs, and corporate records. She is especially strong when writing about the tangled corporate and business relationships that went into each making of land. Her work also makes major contributions in explaining the changing technology and geology of land making. It also enhances our understanding of the history of civil engineering. The note on sources provides an excellent introduction to historical research on Boston. She has planned her book to minimize overlap with Karl Haglund's excellent, recent Inventing the Charles River (2003) and Alex Krieger and David Cobb with Amy Turner, eds., Mapping Boston (1999). MIT Press deserves high credit for the high standard of production in this beautifully illustrated, lavishly mapped book.

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