The art historian Charles Callahan Perkins (1823–1886) taught Boston elites to embrace early Italian Renaissance art, and, in so doing, transformed the cultural landscape of his city. Mostly Unitarian in their religious beliefs, the local elites had previously spurned Italian paintings and sculpture of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries for their Roman Catholicism. However, when the new Museum of Fine Arts opened on July 4, 1876, the institution displayed close to one hundred art objects of the period, mostly copies. Perkins, who had returned recently from twenty-five years in Europe as an acclaimed scholar and illustrator of early Italian Renaissance sculpture and an expert in fine arts museums, was responsible for this result. Perkins focused on art whose “visual rhetoric” reflected the early Italian Renaissance humanist belief in clarity of line and subject as the most pleasing and edifying in art. These Renaissance principles emerged in his view from classical rhetoric, that is strategies for persuasive spoken and written communication, which had long been the core curriculum of Harvard University where Boston elites studied. Perkins also capitalized on the city’s taste for classical sculpture by privileging quattrocento sculpture, which, while more devotional in subject than had traditionally been displayed, did feature a naturalism that evoked ancient art. Chapter one presents four biographical case studies of individuals who were important players in shaping the fertile cultural ground upon which Perkins built a generation later. Chapter two forges the link between classical rhetoric and the fine arts in ante-bellum Boston. Chapter three examines the broad-based revival of early Italian Renaissance art that Perkins encountered in mid-century Europe. Chapter four assesses his own professional oeuvre within that context. The concluding chapter demonstrates how Perkins revamped ideas of what constituted fine art and how it could be viewed by positioning early Renaissance art at the new Museum as a powerful visually rhetorical tool, thus achieving a far more wide-reaching cultural change than previous scholarship has suggested.

Cette thèse propose une étude théorique et empirique de la rhoticité et du ‘r’ de sandhi en anglais. La grande variabilité phonétique des consonnes traditionnellement considérées comme « rhotiques » et leur comportement phonologique relativement stable nous conduisent à proposer une caractérisation de ces segments fondée sur la sonorité des unités et leur distribution au sein des syllabes. Nous adoptons le cadre de la Phonologie de Dépendance dont les représentations, fondées sur des primitives phonologiques unaires, offrent une traduction des hiérarchies de sonorité plus transparente que les traits binaires de la tradition générative. Nous proposons une interprétation théorique de la vocalisation historique du /r/ dans le sud de l’Angleterre en nous appuyant sur une étude historique de son évolution. Un volet empirique est consacré à l’étude de la rhoticité et du ‘r’ de sandhi dans deux enquêtes réalisées selon le protocole et la méthodologie du programme PAC (Phonologie de l’Anglais Contemporain : usages, variétés et structure), l’une dans le Lancashire (Royaume-Uni) et l’autre à Boston (États-Unis). / This thesis offers a theoretical and empirical study of rhoticity and sandhi ‘r’ in English. The great phonetic variability of so called “rhotic” consonants and their stable phonological behaviour lead us to an analysis of these segments based on the sonority of units and their distribution within syllables. Our analysis is couched within the framework of Dependency Phonology whose representations are based on unary phonological primes and offer a better understanding of sonority scales than traditional binary features. We provide a theoretical interpretation of the vocalization of /r/ in the south of England based on an historical study of its evolution. An empirical section is dedicated to the study of rhoticity and sandhi ‘r’ in two corpora collected in Lancashire (UK) and Boston (USA) following the protocol and methodology of the PAC project (Phonologie de l’Anglais Contemporain : usages, variétés et structure/ Phonology of Contemporary English: usage, varieties and structure)

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Meteorology; and, (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 1966. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 49-53). / Surface ozone concentrations were measured in the Greater Boston area from November, 1964 to December, 1965. Ozone was monitored continuosly using a Mast microcoulombmetric sensor. A chromium trioxide filter was fitted to the air inlet of the sensor in order to remove negatively interfering sulphur dioxide. Daily ozone concentrations near the surface varied from somewhat greater than 10 to less than 1 pphm by volume. The highest concentrations occurred in late spring while the lowest concentrations occurred in the winter. Such a seasonal variation would be expected if the ozone had arrived in the troposphere from the lower stratosphere. The concentration of ozone during the spring and early summer showed a much greater variability from day to day than was exhibited during the fall and winter months. / by Donald Allen Widen. / M.S.

Thesis. 1975. M.S.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Meteorology. / Bibliography: leaf 94. / M.S.

With All Due Modesty: The Selected Letters of Fanny Goldstein is an annotated edition of the correspondence of Fanny Goldstein (1895–1961), librarian, social activist, and founder of Jewish Book Week. Goldstein’s accomplishments include building a significant collection of Judaica for the Boston Public Library; compiling some of the earliest bibliographies of Jewish literature in English; evaluating manuscripts for publishers; writing book reviews; and lecturing and writing on a wide range of subjects related to Jews and Judaism. The purpose of the edition is to provide a picture of Goldstein’s life as a Jew, a woman, a librarian, and a social activist and in so doing, to contribute to a more complete understanding of Boston’s Jewish community in the first half of the twentieth century. I have included in the edition both incoming and outgoing letters with a wide range of correspondents, including Charles Angoff, Mary Antin, Isaac Asimov, Alice Stone Blackwell, Felix Frankfurter, Molly Picon, Ellery Sedgwick, and Friderike Zweig. The letters span the years from 1930 to 1960. The edition includes extensive annotation based on Goldstein’s newspaper and magazine articles, pamphlets, book reviews, and other writings; hundreds of Goldstein’s letters not published here; accounts published in the Jewish press and the mainstream press; and correspondence neither written nor received by Goldstein but bearing on her life and work.

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston University

No description available.

The John F. Kennedy Expressway, commonly known as The Central Artery, is an elevated highway running north-south through downtown Boston. It is an immense structure which cuts its way through the urban fabric, is a considerable source of noise and pollution, and visually segregates the city’s downtown from its vital waterfront. Recently a study was undertaken to explore the possibility of removing the elevated Central Artery and replacing it with a tunnel in order to alleviate traffic congestion and noise, curtail pollution and reunite the downtown with the waterfront. If this proposal were carried through, fifteen air-rights parcels (approximately twenty acres) would become available for development in Boston’s inner core. This thesis explores one possible way of using a specific air-rights parcel above the proposed tunnel. / Master of Architecture

Thesis. 1977. M.C.P.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCH. / Bibliography : leaves 188-190. / M.C.P.

Thesis (M.C.P.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 1980. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCH. / Bibliography: leaves 196-197. / by Tracy Renée Smith. / M.C.P.