Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction : Boston from peninsula to metropolis / Anthony N. Penna -- The drowning of Boston Harbor and the development of the shoreline / Peter S. Rosen and Duncan M. FitzGerald -- What lies beneath : science, nature, and the making of Boston Harbor / Michael Rawson -- Remaking Boston Harbor : cleaning up after ourselves / Steven M. Rudnick -- In search of the Shawmut Peninsula : using modern cartographic analysis to discover the "original" Boston shoreline / Stephen T. Mague -- Remaking Boston, remaking Massachusetts / Brian Donahue -- A city (only partly) on a hill : terrain and land use in pre-twentieth-century Boston / William B. Meyer -- Reforestation in Norfolk County, Massachusetts, 1850-1910 / David Soll -- How metropolitan parks shaped greater Boston, 1893-1945 / James C. O'Connell -- Reclaiming the middle Charles River reservation / Daniel Driscoll and Karl Haglund -- Boston's weather and climate histories / William B. Meyer -- "Rain down righteousness" : interpretations of natural events in mid-eighteenth-century Boston / Lauri Bauer Coleman -- Biological responses to climate change in Boston / Abraham J. Miller-Rushing and Richard B. Primack.