The best introductions to the historic setting of our architecture
and civilization are the local guide-books 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.