Editorial

Abstract

O March number contains three essays with, for the Quarterly, an unusual chronological breadth; but it is one that the editors are pleased to present. They serve to remind readers and potential authors of the editors’ desire not to be associated with a particular time period but to cover the entire span of the history and literary culture of New England. The three essays chosen for this issue, Sean Wilentz’s study of nineteenth-century northern abolitionists, Tatiana Cruz’s of twentieth-century African American and Latinx parent activism in the Boston public schools, and Theodore Vozar’s of the use of a Greek textbook in Harvard’s seventeenth-century philology curriculum illustrates the chronological diversity the editors hope to see in future submissions. One result of the editors’ desire to encourage essays on different topics with a broader chronology was our co-sponsorship with the Massachusetts Historical Society of the American Political Culture Symposium held last September. From that symposium, we have included Princeton professor Sean Wilentz’s keynote address, “The Radicalism of Northern Abolitionism.” Wilentz stresses the role of the critical, but seemingly small advances put forth by early advocates of the movement. By calling attention to the gradual but incremental challenges to the structures of northern slavery, he illustrates how radical early abolition initiated the rise of free Black communities and contributed to the expansion of protests against enslavement generally. Not part of the symposium but similar in approach, Tatiana M. F. Cruz’s examination of African American and Latinx parent activism describes events that preceded Boston’s busing crisis of the 1970s. Cruz describes efforts of Black and