Boston #1! (for meanest population)

Now it would be easy, in typical Boston fashion, to get defensive at this point. Who do these people think they are - these outsiders, no less - taking potshots at our fair city? But there is a vital message here, one that we all need to hear. And I can assure you that these particular outsiders, the University of Michigan’s Nansook Park and Christopher Peterson, don’t have anything against us.

“Boston is a great city,’’ insists Peterson, even as he admits our last place finish is “quite striking.’’

Three potential explanations suggest themselves. The first is the city’s peculiar history, or what Boston College history professor Thomas O’Connor calls “a whole series of periods of division, hatred, and separations that have shaped Boston for almost 400 years.’’ The Puritan founders, O’Connor points out, believed in a God who had selected a few, the elect, for heaven, and the rest for hell.

This founding tribal idea, O’Connor and others argue, has been reinforced in successive eras. When Irish Catholics began to pour into the city, they were met with vicious discrimination. Then, by the late 19th and early 20th century, this nativist thinking found new targets in the Italians and the Jews, and, later, other groups. The city also has a deep history of overlapping economic and religious divisions - Protestants, who ran economic institutions, versus Catholics, who controlled the political machine. And then there was busing.

Other cities, of course, have experienced division and conflict, but any fair reading of history suggests that Boston has a remarkable record of achievement in this regard. Boston is, famously, “a city of neighborhoods,’’ of segregation, and habits of mind are hard to break.