In praise of the page, fishing and witches, farming to forests

In “A City So Grand’’ (Beacon Press, $26.95) popular historian Stephen Puleo focuses on what might be Boston’s salad days, its 1850-1900 rise from big town to international metropolis. With a superb handling of narrative, Puleo courses through Boston’s role in the antislavery movement and the Civil War. He tells a gripping tale of the Great Fire of 1872 and the subsequent reinvention of the city. In Puleo’s hands, Boston itself becomes a heroic character, driving toward modernity from a salutary combination of moral fiber and gumption.

History professor Michael Rawson credits modern Boston with shaping American ideas about the relationship of a city to the natural world. His “Eden on the Charles: The Making of Boston’’ (Harvard University Press, $29.95) is full of examples. To create a municipal water supply Bostonians argued that water was a right, not a privilege. Rawson even contends that we invented the “Romantic suburb’’ as a rural enclave that workmen left daily to labor in the city. As soon as we built a metropolis to triumph over the raw countryside, he suggests, we set about re-creating Eden in our parklands.

In “The King’s Best Highway’’ (Scribner, $27.50) Eric Jaffe has performed a valiant rescue of the scattered stories of the Boston Post Road, which he boldly calls “the route that made America.’’ The original, of course, is really two main routes between Boston and New York — one that follows the coast and another that heads due west to Springfield, then follows the Connecticut River to the coast. In writing about either fork, Jaffe can send shivers down a reader’s neck by evoking the early years when the post road was little more than a barely beaten wilderness path.