I + 

Historical Background + 

The best introductions to the historic setting of our architecture and civilization are the local guidebooks and histories. See, for example, Stokes’s excellent and exhaustive Iconography of Manhattan, and the Memorial History of Boston, edited by Justin Winsor. Both are profusely illustrated. In the wave of civic enthusiasm that swept over the country in the ’nineties, many local descriptions and histories were written. For the most part, they are loose, rambling, credulous, and devoid of sociological insight: but occasionally there is a nugget in the matrix. Powell’s Historic Towns series covers broad ground. As regional histories, Weeden’s Economic and Social History of New England, and Mr. Samuel Eliot Morison’s Maritime History of Massachusetts, stand in a class by themselves: in them we have the beginnings of what W. H. Riehl called a “natural history” of the human community. + 